Holmberg, Reba

ORAL HISTORY OF REBA HOLMBERG
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
with Anne Garland
April 30, 2002
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: We’re at Reba Holmberg’s home and she’s going to be giving us her oral history. I’m Jim Kolb and also here is Anne Garland as an observer and helper. So, Reba, let���s get started by first having you tell us how and why you came to early Oak Ridge during World War II.
Mrs. Holmberg: I came to Oak Ridge just out of college with a degree with Human Ecology and went to work in an analytical laboratory with Tennessee Eastman at Building 9733-1 in Y-12.
Mr. Kolb: When was that?
Mrs. Holmberg: 1943.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, early.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah. In the fall of ’43, right. And I worked there for about six years, because in those days when you got married you went home, you quit your job and went home to – all our friends seemed to do that. We didn’t have kids for a couple years, but I never went back to work until several years later when our last kid was in school, and then I was an instructional aide at Linden Elementary School for about ten years, half day.
Mr. Kolb: With whom and for whom did you work at Y-12 in the Chemistry Lab?
Mrs. Holmberg: You mean who was the – Charles Susano, S-U-S-A-N-O. He was the building director, building supervisor. The first guy who was there in the very beginning, his name was Miller. I don’t remember his first name, but he came here from California and early on, I think, when the war was over, he went back to California and then Suzy took over at that time.
Mr. Kolb: How big a group were you in?
Mrs. Holmberg: How big of a group?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well it was – I worked in a lab with about six people, I guess, but in the building there were probably fifty or more that interacted, different projects, I mean. I would get samples from another lab and/or run a spectrograph from another, go to another lab to do that, so it was all interactive.
Mr. Kolb: I see. Probably good job for a young woman scientist.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, I wasn’t really a scientist. I’d only had two years of chemistry, and as I said, my mom was working there as a chaufferette, and she – it was a car pool, and those people who were qualified to have a car to drive them safe from building to building, or plant to plant, or she even took them out of town, so she came in contact with people who were in position to give me a job, and she got to know them pretty well, so she kept asking, telling them my daughter is coming out of school and she’s looking for a job and one day one of them said, well has she had chemistry? And she said yes, so –
Mr. Kolb: The rare find.
Mrs. Holmberg: A week later – in fact I’m not sure they took very long to clear me, because I had hardly been out of my own back yard – so –
Mr. Kolb: You got clearance in a week?
Mrs. Holmberg: I don’t remember. It didn’t take long to clear me. Oh, I don’t think I got it in a week. I remember I had to go to Wheat in that old school there to work on the indoctrination and clearance.
Mr. Kolb: So did you have any training outside of Y-12 before you got into the job?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well they trained me on the job.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, you know, things I didn’t know, they would train me and show me how to do it, and so a lot of it was routine ’cause I’d be testing fluids from the – what was the thing that all the gals sat at and turned knobs?
Mr. Kolb: Calutrons.
Mrs. Holmberg: I guess so. Anyway I got those samples to test for water, and I don’t remember, but that was a job I had to do every morning, to test that. And then it was very crowded, lots of people in the lab in the early days, so sometimes I didn’t have anything to do and they were after me to move over so they’d have my desk to work, it was so crowded.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my, lot of fast pace in other words.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, and the GI’s were coming too, SEDs, Special Engineer Detachment and so we’d get a new group of those and have to move over and make room for them.
Mr. Kolb: Analytical work also?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, right. We had about three gals who were Ph.D. chemists in the building. Most of us were – most of the people were professional chemists; there were a few of us who weren’t.
Mr. Kolb: Right, but you had enough background you could do the job.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, I could do it. I mean I could titrate and do equations and things like that.
Mr. Kolb: But you never heard the word uranium or plutonium, so what did they tell you, what kind of –
Mrs. Holmberg: They called it tuballoy, and when you used it in the equation you used the word T, but you used the periodic table number that calls for uranium.
Mr. Kolb: 92.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, 92, and I think I’ve told you I was using it, and I thought, ��What is this T stuff?’ So I looked on the table and it was uranium, but my job wasn’t so important that they [thought] that I could figure out what was going on, so they didn’t bother to tell me. And so that night I had a date with a guy who did know what was going on, and in a public place I said, “Oh I learned what T is today. It’s uranium,” and he became very agitated, “Oh, don’t say that where people can hear you!��� So why didn’t they tell me not to say it?
Mr. Kolb: Oh, they didn’t tell you not to? Well, of course, they never told you what T was.
Mrs. Holmberg: They never told me what T was, and I guess they didn’t think I was going to figure it out.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, yeah, but you figured it out, as other people did too. As a chemist, yeah, that’s kind of a dead giveaway, 92; and there it is, what can you say? Well that brings the secrecy issue up. I mean, did you have any knowledge or feeling about being scrutinized by the FBI or security people?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, actually I was. I don’t know what they call him. I did cooperate with the security. At one time, they moved that building, the people in that building up behind the Castle on the Hill, those buildings that are behind the Castle –
Mr. Kolb: The training buildings?
Mrs. Holmberg: For the [inaudible] group up there, and of course we were right across the street from the Castle on the Hill, and one day I got this phone call and I recognized that he was an important person. I can’t remember who he was, but I knew who he was and he said, “I need to talk to you. Leave the lab and don’t tell anybody that you’re coming, just come. It won’t take long, but just find a convenient time to walk out, and I’d like to talk to you.” So I thought, gonna get a promotion or I’m gonna get fired or who knows. Well what it was, they needed to have people to keep their ears open and I had to send in a report every week and I still have an envelope, ACME Credit Company with a Knoxville address, and let them know if I had seen anything suspicious, and I never did. They were all hard working people forever. The only time that I knew that security was breeched – I sometimes got called up to work in the office when the secretary – I couldn’t type but I could answer the phone, and sometimes he’d call me out of the lab to take her place. She was pregnant and sick a lot, but I guess she was there that day, because this guy had just gotten married. He was on deferment to work there, and he had just gotten married and he said, “Gee, I wish I could bring my wife in to meet all these people, all my friends.” Well, we had to take samples back and forth to Y-12, so we had a truck driver who gave you a ride with a guard, and then we had a guard on the gate to get into the building. Well the truck driver guard was sitting there in the office, and the secretary stupidly said, “Oh, I’ll let you borrow my badge.” So rather than tell her, “You can’t do this; that’s a no-no,” he tracked her, and when they came in the first gate, of course, the guard was waiting for them. So he was ushered out that very afternoon, got fired, and probably had to go with the Army, ’cause he was on deferment. So that’s the only time I know. It wasn’t serious, but it was a breach of security.
Mr. Kolb: It was a rule that was broken.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, it was a rule that was broken. It was a very stupid thing to do, but you sometimes get complacent.
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t make the same mistake twice.
Mrs. Holmberg: “Just do it,” you know, like, “Bring her in. We all want to meet her.”
Mr. Kolb: But, I mean, were you aware? I guess you were aware there were security people around.
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh yes, oh yes, I mean, all the signs all over the plants and on the highways about zipping your lip, and I didn’t know what I was protecting, but I learned. I mean I talked to Bob about it, and even he didn’t –
Mr. Kolb: Your husband?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, he didn’t even tell me what was going on; he didn’t even spill the beans too.
Mr. Kolb: I see, but he did know, or he knew at the time?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, he knew. Well he knew, early on he suspected it, ’cause he was working on the same project at Ames [Laboratory], and he read an article in the Saturday Evening Post about fission, so he decided that he was going to read more about it, so he went to the library, and all the books were in the boundary. They had taken all the library books concerning fission out of the library, and then the guy, his professor, that he worked for there said, “Well, Bob, we’re working on the same types of things they are in Oak Ridge,” so he knew when he came. Actually he worked at Castle on the Hill as a G.I., and he didn’t go in the labs until the war was over.
Mr. Kolb: Well, we were sort of jumping ahead. Tell us a little bit about your family history from this area too, background.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, I had this genealogy report at – well, let me say that I’m Reba Holmberg, the daughter of Lula and Andy Justice, Lula Jet and Andy Justice, and Lula was the daughter of James and Clara Jet, who was the daughter of Isabella and Alex Lockett who lived in Scarboro. Well, Scarboro is actually at the end of – right across from the Arboretum is where they lived. And my other grandparents, Tolbert and Louisa Jet, lived in a house where Willowbrook School is, on that very hill, lived in a house there.
Mr. Kolb: Both had farms.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yes, it was all farming. There were people who left the area to have jobs, but here it was farming, not very big farms, mostly subsistence farming, no big – no money crops except for tobacco, and my grandfather sold some cattle. And then my grandparents, Jim and Clara Jett, lived right here on the corner of Louisiana and Robertsville, and their strip of land around here, from about where Bruner’s is up to the top of the ridge, and then my dad, strip of land around, right beside it. My mom was an only child so she sort of stuck with her family. Actually, when they left Oak Ridge they still bought places side by side. And I had one sister –
Mr. Kolb: Did she work in Oak Ridge too?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, she died, she died young.
Mr. Kolb: No other siblings then?
Mrs. Holmberg: No.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: And in this valley, there were most of my grandfather’s brothers and sisters. You know, he had two brothers and two sisters and all, and their families all lived within a few miles of each other. Actually, where the Country Club is, down beside the old Girl Scout camp, that house stayed there for a long time, where one of his sisters lived. I don’t know if you remember it, but it was a –
Mr. Kolb: I remember the Girl Scout camp.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, or at the Girl Scout – but a big two-story frame house, and they used it for some things and they finally tore it down. And then, his – well, we lived almost next door to each other, or right in this area.
Mr. Kolb: So you had a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles –
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: – sounds like.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yes, that’s right, and a very extended family because my mom was an only child and there are only two of us, so I had two sets of parents. My mom was an outdoors person. She was a horse woman. She always had horses and rode horses, so she didn’t particularly care for the duties of the house, so my grandmother had to cook for the field hands, you know, so she always had this big lunch or big dinner. It was dinner, at mealtime, it was, you know, the people working the farm got fed too, so I’d always go there for lunch.
Mr. Kolb: To your grandmother’s.
Mrs. Holmberg: To my grandmother’s, who lived next door.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you just walked over.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, we lived side by side.
Mr. Kolb: Then you went to work for college at UT [University of Tennessee]?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, I graduated high school, Robertsville High School, which is Robertsville Middle School now, and most of that building’s been torn down except the auditorium was our new gym. It is still standing. And then I went to UT and then came back and went to work.
Mr. Kolb: There was that – how many other girls your age went to UT? Was that kind of rare or –
Mrs. Holmberg: There were eighteen of us in my graduating class –
Mr. Kolb: Of Robertsville?
Mrs. Holmberg: Robertsville. It was first grade – didn’t have kindergarten – first grade through twelfth, all in that one building and there were eighteen people in our graduating class. And I know three of the boys went to UT, and I went to UT, and one of the gals went someplace else. I don’t remember where she went. So there were about five of us out of the graduating class.
Mr. Kolb: Two girls and three boys.
Mrs. Holmberg: Three boys.
Mr. Kolb: So it was kind of rare, at that time, to go to college.
Mrs. Holmberg: I guess so.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, good, and so here you’re in Oak Ridge. Where did you live when you first got your job? Of course, your home is gone.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well they bought a farm just over the ridge out by Norwood, by the shopping center. Oh, do you know where the –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, towards Oliver Springs.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah towards Oliver Springs, the Covenant Oliver Springs Clinic. We still own that farm, and we sold them that corner to build, and our house was on that corner where the clinic is now.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well just north a little ways, yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, cause my folks were gone and –
Mr. Kolb: Your folks were gone?
Mrs. Holmberg: They were at the time that they bought the clinic; they had died. The realtor said, “You know, if [a] family member wants to fix it up and live there, that would be fine, but [it would be] too expensive to fix all the repairs and rent it out, you know, too much of a hassle.” So we were glad to have them come and tear it down.
Mr. Kolb: But I guess we should talk about the process of being evicted and your family being evicted then and having to move.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well my grandfather came home one day and found this. It doesn’t say you should leave immediately, I don’t think, but this on the door. Everybody has – a lot of people have those little things they fill out.
Mr. Kolb: No, it doesn’t say how long you’ve got. I’ve heard the number, two weeks.
Mrs. Holmberg: Okay here it says, here it is. This is the one that says.
Mr. Kolb: Okay another one. It still doesn’t say how long you had to get out did it?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, it just said vacate immediately.
Mr. Kolb: Immediately, but like I say, I’ve heard it was two weeks was what they wanted.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well you know I think the place where they needed urgently to have people out, maybe they did that, like maybe where they were putting the plants, but where we lived it –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, it varied with location, okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: Varied. Where we lived, they started on the other end, ripping the landscape apart and putting houses, and that was where a housing area was. So they never gave it any hassle, but my grandfather knew it was coming, and he already had his eye on a place.
Mr. Kolb: How did he?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, just gossip in the neighborhood.
Mr. Kolb: Oh.
Mrs. Holmberg: You know, like Bill said they’d built a railroad spur and then surveyors were in here.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, in late ’42, when they started doing activities.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, and then they heard that this was coming. In fact some people had already gotten notices, so he’d begun looking already, and he had found this place. So when he got his notice, he went over and sealed the deal so we’d, except for moving everything, and that was thing that was hard, they wouldn’t let you move anything that was nailed down, you know, and I think they moved in January, and it was kind of hard to –
Mr. Kolb: January of ’43?
Mrs. Holmberg: ’42, I guess, ’43?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, started in September of ’42, so it would have been ’43.
Mrs. Holmberg: Okay, so it was pretty hard to get everything, but as I said, I wasn’t here; I was in and out. But I don’t remember seeing the trucks come and go and moving the household stuff and things like that.
Mr. Kolb: And a lot of other people in the same area were moving at the same time too.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, some of our relatives moved to Knoxville, Andersonville, and all around the area.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but you were sort of fortunate you didn’t go very far.
Mrs. Holmberg: So to get back to your question, I lived at home.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, you stayed at home.
Mrs. Holmberg: And my mom worked at Y-12 also, so we rode together.
Mr. Kolb: And what did you father do? Did he just work at the farm?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yes, he worked for Stone & Webster; he was in security. And my mom worked for Tennessee Eastman as a chaufferette, and I don’t really know what my grandparents did, but they even had jobs. But I picked up, when I took things off the farm after everybody was gone, I took this little thing, little box because I thought it was so pretty, and I found paycheck stubs and all sorts of things that told me they had jobs too. I don’t think they worked long, but they did go work.
Mr. Kolb: About what age where they? In their sixties do you think?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well my dad ���
Mr. Kolb: I mean, your grandparents.
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh, my grandparents –
Mr. Kolb: Could’ve been –
Mrs. Holmberg: You don’t want me to go through these papers, do you?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well, they were in good health, enough to work, obviously.
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh yeah, they were healthy.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that’s all right don’t go –
Mrs. Holmberg: I was very fortunate. Most of my relatives lived to be quite old and did not have any debilitating disease. They went sort of suddenly with a heart stroke.
Mr. Kolb: So you lived on the farm, and how long did you stay with your parents on the farm then?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, from ’43 to when we were married in ’50. Then when I married Bob, we moved, we got a house in Oak Ridge, and we lived first in a block house in Woodland and, ’cause we weren’t eligible for cemestos – they’d become very popular then, and you had to have kids to get extra rooms – so we lived in Woodland and then they built some private houses, still government subsidized out on East Drive. We lived there, and then we bought this house. We moved in – we built it in 1960. So we’ve lived here the whole time.
Mr. Kolb: Good, so you were really kind of just on the edge, not in the community per se. Did you get involved in any of the activities in town, in the Oak Ridge government, ’cause you’d come into Oak Ridge, just come back and forth?
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh yeah, ’cause we had passes ’cause we were –
Mr. Kolb: You had passes, you had to come.
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh, yes, I came in all the time.
Mr. Kolb: Did you ride the bus to work?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, car. I drove my – mom drove; we drove our family car.
Mr. Kolb: To work?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, it’s almost as close to Y-12 from where they are. It’s just five minutes on the other side of Outer Drive, so we drove to Y-12 every day.
Ann Garland: Was your mother’s car part of her job? Did she drive her car?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, not her private car – they had their own cars – but the company, government issue cars.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, the reason I ask is, I heard so much about the bus system and how many people rode buses everywhere, you know, you didn’t have to have a car almost, but you had a car so –
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, well, in fact they had people working around the clock, and they asked me to take an evening shift and I said, I’ve got no way to get to work ’cause I ride with my mom, and they bought it. I didn’t have to do shift work.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, but you could have gotten a ride on the bus, I betcha.
Mrs. Holmberg: Probably.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause I know of people, I heard of people that came in, you know, from that area on a bus, to go to work.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, we went to, I know if you’ve heard of Whittle Springs, but that used to be the popular place to go dancing.
Mr. Kolb: In Knoxville.
Mrs. Holmberg: In Knoxville. And, speaking of Fred, we were over there with Fred Nelson one night at a party at Whittle Springs, and his car died pretty close to the Southern Depot. And do you know that we could – just hopped on a bus. They were coming out of Knoxville at one o’clock in the morning. I don’t know how we knew about it, but we got a free bus from Knoxville back home and left the car there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, so Fred Nelson was here during the war too?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know that, okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, he and Bob worked together.
Mr. Kolb: Well, okay. Then, going back to – did you have any recreational activities in town that you took advantage of while you were single?
Mrs. Holmberg: We went – well, we had a lot of friends, and we would collect friends and go to Big Ridge or to the Smokies, and we went to dances. We were very early members of the Playhouse and Symphony and Duplicate Bridge and –
Mr. Kolb: Now these friends –
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh, a couple of clubs I belonged to, one was a sitters club which was interesting because –
Mr. Kolb: Unmarried women do the sitting?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, it was families, and you were in a pool, and you would sit for another family. I’d say there was twenty of us, and they kept records, and somebody would say, “I need somebody to stay with my kids Thursday night,” so you’d go stay there Thursday night for four hours, and then you could call and then somebody in the club would come and stay like –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, swap out, yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: Swap. And then I belonged to, I guess it’s College Women’s Club, which was active, pretty active. We did – yeah, it was not, you know, Association of University Women, we made up our own name, I think, College Women’s Club, and we had one philanthropic project. We did a scholarship and we did volunteer babysitting. I don’t know why, but we did for maybe people who needed our – I can’t remember why we did it, but occasionally we did volunteer.
Mr. Kolb: Well, not everyone was in a club, so maybe they couldn’t afford it, or something like that.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, it wasn���t among our members; it was people in the community.
Mr. Kolb: And babies were coming right and left, as I understand it.
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: The hospital was kicking up babies by the dozen.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, my water broke with our second child on Friday, so of course they put me to bed in the hospital, and Dr. Pugh said, “Well, I don’t want to induce labor today, because we’ve got so many people back there; we’ll wait till in the morning.” So Saturday morning I got ready to go, and by that time it was crowded again, but it was too late.
Mr. Kolb: Some things you can’t put off for very long.
Mrs. Holmberg: Right. Some of the things you might like to know is about what we did here in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah that’s right, you mentioned the Playhouse, the Symphony –
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, I��m talking about pre-Oak Ridge, okay?
Mr. Kolb: Oh, pre-Oak Ridge, okay, right, yeah, good. ’Cause when you went to high school there was a community there too in Robertsville area.
Mrs. Holmberg: Right. Robertsville school served all twelve grades, mostly two grades to a room. Teachers were not required to have certificates; often a conference with a school official was all that was required. In early years, children often left school as soon as they learned to read and write and maybe didn’t go at all. My mother said she rode her pony to school. A shed that was provided for the animals protected them during the day. Each teacher – there were probably fifteen or more in the class. While I was in high school in the late thirties, there were eighteen people in my graduation class, probably less than a hundred people in the whole high school. Choice of subjects was limited. We had morning and afternoon recess and one hour for lunch. No lunches were served. Boiled corn, baked sweet potatoes in whatever form children brought came in lunch buckets from home. All kids through first grade were let out at the same time on the playground breaks and no teacher was inside. If problems came up, they were solved with the help of older children. A teacher would be called in case of emergency. The school was heated by a coal furnace, steam radiator, and in very cold weather, the pipes would burst enough that we’d have an extra winter vacation. Every morning, school started with the sound of a huge bell that the principal kicked on the front porch. We lined up according to rooms, marched in to a rousing rendition of A Country Garden – I’ll never forget that – on the piano, and Chapel followed, and devotionals, group song and other special events. They would let – every morning they would let kids do anything that – there were a lot of self-taught musicians, like somebody would play a banjo and somebody would do a fiddle, or somebody would do a reading or –
Mr. Kolb: This is a sharing time.
Mrs. Holmberg: Sing a song if you wanted, felt like you wanted to sing something or bring a guitar or play your fiddle or do some reading, dramatic, some kids took dramatic reading classes, so that was –
Mr. Kolb: Encouraged?
Mrs. Holmberg: We had outside toilets and had to meander down the path to the edge of the woods.
Mr. Kolb: Are you serious?
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh no, we got plumbing in the gym.
Mr. Kolb: But I mean, no outdoor commodes?
Mrs. Holmberg: Pit toilets, oh, we had pit toilets. Yeah, I didn’t make that clear. No we had toilets; we had proper chemical pit toilets. Electricity came in 1935. Spring houses and ice boxes were used until this time. My dad maintained a three miles line of – ’cause he needed it for his business, a phone in the area. We lived here [refers to map], and he ran a line, built it himself from where Kim Son’s Restaurant is [171 Robertsville Road], ’cause that building was my uncle’s grocery store in those days, and he maintained that line and people used to come from miles to – emergencies to call a doctor or something like that. My grandmother peddled produce, eggs, garden vegetables. Some people had jobs at the Clinton Knitting Mill, or the L&N railroad, school teaching, my dad had a coal and ice business, but most jobs were in farming. And my folks lived – well this is the swimming pool and the house where they lived was up by the swimming pool. My grandparents –
Mr. Kolb: Pretty good size; it’s a lake, like a pond.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yes, it was a cow pond.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, it was dammed up for – deep enough to swim in, I guess.
Mrs. Holmberg: I don’t have it – there was a big Victorian house there at Grove Center. I don’t know if you remember that house.
Mr. Kolb: Grove Center, near the Swimming pool?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Is this where the, where our present swimming pool is?
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, that’s spring fed.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, yeah, I didn’t realize you meant that, okay. There was a house there – let’s see, not – you mean before the pool, before the swimming pool was put in?
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, that’s okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: I’m sorry.
Mr. Kolb: Well was this a relative or a –
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, my grandparents lived there. In fact, back – my mother was married on the front porch of that house, and she was an only child, and during World War I she ran the tractor and did a lot of things. My dad served in World War I in France, and he was wounded in Argonne Forest and got out a little early, I think, because of that.
Mr. Kolb: But he survived.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, he survived; he was wounded in the arm. He had a big scar for a long time, I mean, still, the rest of his life, but he was sent to the south of France to recover and somebody liked his attitude or something because they didn’t want to send him back. They needed him there, so he didn’t have to go back to that awful battle at Verdun, so it maybe saved his life, by getting that shot in the arm.
Mr. Kolb: That happened a lot, yeah. Some men would rather have a minor wound and get out than have the chance of something really terrible happening.
Mrs. Holmberg: And social life, mostly get together with family and friends, family reunion. And, as I say, people were self-taught with their instruments and one of the most common things was [to] get together with an evening of music-making with freezers of homemade ice cream and cookies, you know. Somebody would make a freezer of ice cream and say, “Can you come and play your fiddle or your guitar?” or maybe three or so, and then they would come in. And of course, ladies would piece quilts and play cards. And my dad had a truck or so, and he often took it to the park in Knoxville for Fourth of July. It was not a covered truck, and if it rained, we couldn’t go. But hay down and quilts, and it was really a hayride and –
Mr. Kolb: The children would ride in the back?
Mrs. Holmberg: Everybody, the adults and children; it was a big truck, so maybe ten, fifteen people. Or you also took them to the skating rink in Knoxville too.
Mr. Kolb: Outdoor bus.
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right. As I said, if it rained, we always – you know, Fourth of July it often rains ’cause it’s that time of – kind of weather here, and we couldn’t go if it was raining. The county agent – you know, you’ve heard of home demonstration, 4-H clubs – they were very active, and a lot of the ladies liked that they learned new skills, and she’d come out once a month. We drove to Knoxville many times a year to shop, especially at Christmas when the tobacco crops had had been sold and there would be extra money for Christmas shopping. Basketball games were a big draw ’cause we had a lot of competition with Wheat and Clinton, and we would go on a school bus to the surrounding schools and boys and girls put on the same – [of] course, picnic supper, musical programs, all day singing with dinner on the ground, and then we had a county fair.
Mr. Kolb: That was the church focus of some of these activities, or not?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well as I’ve said in here [refers to memoire], church was usually just a religious thing.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, and not a social thing.
Mrs. Holmberg: Not a social thing. They had Vacation Bible School in the summer, but no, it was not a social thing. School was the place you went for pie suppers and –
Mr. Kolb: Dinner and singing on the ground was not at church.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yes that was, on Sundays.
Mr. Kolb: That’s what I’ve heard, you know.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, groups who had quartets or solos, they’d go to these church things. I mean, where Y-12 [is], there’s a New Hope Baptist Church. We had, in this area, we had two churches. We had a Methodist Church and a Baptist Church. Everybody brought food, and, you know, those things are maybe a thing of the past. Our daughter who lives in Minneapolis, they won’t let you bring potluck anymore because it’s maybe – they have to cater it by registered caterers.
Mr. Kolb: Don’t know what the contamination might be.
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right, no boy scouts, no church, anything, no potlucks anymore are allowed to do that.
Mr. Kolb: We’re not that sophisticated, progress.
Mrs. Holmberg: And my father, when we left, my father bought a farm in Oliver Springs near Tri-county. We still have it and one of the farmers looks after the cattle. We hike with the dogs, cut Christmas trees, and collect wildflowers and pick blackberries. Those are our cash crops!
Mr. Kolb: Well, blackberries, yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: Some years it’s good.
Mr. Kolb: You know, it sounds like everyone was busy enough. I mean, you know, didn’t just sit around dwaddling your – of course you had no TV to waste time with and that sort of thing.
Mrs. Holmberg: No, that’s true; that was another thing, no TV. But they had –
Mr. Kolb: Radio.
Mrs. Holmberg: Wireless, you know. No, we didn’t get electricity until ’43, but had radio with a static –
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t have electricity in ’43?
Mrs. Holmberg: I don’t mean ’43. ’32.
Mr. Kolb: ’32, okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: ’32.
Mr. Kolb: Until ’32, okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: I was ten years old. I remember the day I came home and flipped the button and the light came on.
Mr. Kolb: That’s REA. Rural Electrification [Administration] brought it in, yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: Right.
Mr. Kolb: That pre-dated TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority]. TVA didn’t start till – well, Norris Dam was started in ’33, didn’t produce until ’36.
Mrs. Holmberg: But my grandmother’s sister lived in Wheat. They had a Delco plant, and that was always exciting to visit them with electric lights.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, battery; was it AC, DC power probably?
Mrs. Holmberg: I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: Delco was batteries, but I don’t know.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, they didn’t have electricity, and that’s why my dad had a thriving coal and ice business. He rented land from Blue Diamond Coal Company out in Morgan County and had a couple little mines, and they had an ice plant in Knoxville that manufactured ice, so he built a storage ice house in Oliver Springs.
Mr. Kolb: And hauled it with his truck.
Mrs. Holmberg: And he had customers for ice and coal.
Mr. Kolb: Hot and cold.
Mrs. Holmberg: Hot and cold.
Mr. Kolb: That��s the way it is, yeah. Okay. Well you have quite a family history, there’s no doubt about that.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, it’s been a great run.
Mr. Kolb: Well back to World War II era a little bit more then. You said you had a lot of – so you didn’t come into Oak Ridge to do very social activity. You met, I’m sure, lots of different kinds of people.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, we came to Oak Ridge for all the social life. I mean, that’s where my boyfriends lived, that’s where the theaters were, the restaurants, not many though, in those days, there weren’t many.
Mr. Kolb: But cafeterias –
Mrs. Holmberg: Cafeteria, and there was a –
Mr. Kolb: As a plant worker could you go to the cafeteria, I guess. Well, you had pay for your food; it was inexpensive, but you could go in the cafeteria too.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, a lot of the cafeterias were outside the area. The one in Townsite was not behind the gate, you know, was not behind the fence.
Mr. Kolb: It wasn’t?
Mrs. Holmberg: Uhn-uhn.
Mr. Kolb: Townsite was outside the fence?
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh, I mean – not the security fence. If you had a badge – no you couldn’t if you didn’t have a badge to get into the area, but you didn’t have to have a security clearance to go there.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, once you got into the fence there, you could go.
Mrs. Holmberg: You could go. Of course, some of the cafeterias were behind the fence, like the ones at Y-12 and X-10.
Mr. Kolb: But there were places like where downtown is. Wasn’t there a cafeteria there too?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: In the shopping center there?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, but I’m not sure they were open in the evening. I guess they were.
Mr. Kolb: Some of them were.
Mrs. Holmberg: There was a restaurant in the bowling alley. I remember that.
Mr. Kolb: Up in Jackson Square?
Mrs. Holmberg: ’Cause we’d like to take our kids there. When they got restless they could go look at the –
Mr. Kolb: Which bowling alley? The Grove Center?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, Grove Center. There was a restaurant there. And the Mayflower was there.
Mr. Kolb: The Mayflower was up there, yeah, and the T&C Cafeteria, T&C? Right near the bowling alley in Jackson Square. That was the one when I got there, yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: In the very early days –
Mr. Kolb: But, I mean, you came into Oak RIdge for a lot of these different activities, then, yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, most of the –
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause it was so busy.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah and there were things to do here.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, and the people you met were from all over, right?
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right. Especially socially, because most of the people who I knew from before Oak Ridge went home at night, you know; they weren’t here. I had a roommate at UT who lived over by Bull Run and I saw her all the time, but I didn’t see many of my old friends ’cause they’d moved away.
Mr. Kolb: But there still were young people in the area.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, I graduated Oak Ridge, Robertsville High School. My sister had more friends, ’cause she was younger than me and she went to Oliver Springs, so she had a lot of friends there from school, but my friends from school were – well, I worked here and made new friends and it was a community where everybody was new to the area. It was like being pioneers, you know; you were always together trying to find a house, work at the same plants, so it was sort of a joint adventure.
Mr. Kolb: That’s right. Now you worked at Y-12. Did you know much about what was going on at X-10 or Happy Valley at that time, K-25?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well I knew something. I used to go on vacation in Florida with about – six or eight of us gals would hop on the train. We went on the train to Florida and spent the week. In fact, we were there when they dropped the bomb.
Mr. Kolb: Where?
Mrs. Holmberg: In Jacksonville, Florida. Not Jacksonville – St. Augustine. We’d gone down there and rented rooms in a house on the beach.
Mr. Kolb: Vacation.
Mrs. Holmberg: And at that time they had a curfew on the coast. Everything had to be blacked out because they were worried about submarines. And that night we broke the rules and went out on the beach to see the waves, you know, and the lady who ran the house heard us and she became very upset. She said she could lose her license if her guests broke those rules, so we were really in the doghouse. And the next morning, she was knocking on our door, “Want you to see this! I want you to see this!” and they had dropped the bomb.
Mr. Kolb: Wanted to show you a paper, a newspaper?
Mrs. Holmberg: Newspaper, and she called the local newspaper and they came out and took our pictures and we were on the front page of that paper, “Oak Ridgers, Builders of the Bomb in Our City.” And none of us had been near a bomb.
Mr. Kolb: Well you were close enough, you were close, you didn’t know it, yeah.
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: – when the bomb dropped and you were celebrities, overnight.
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right, overnight, went out of the doghouse to being a celebrity.
Mr. Kolb: And so when you go back –
Mrs. Holmberg: And it was news to all of us, all of us gals. It was a surprise to us.
Mr. Kolb: So when you got back to Oak Ridge, things had calmed down a little bit or was the celebration still going on?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, they were pretty excited about what we’d been doing here, yes.
Mr. Kolb: Did some tension let off once they knew that the war was, well the war ended then shortly thereafter.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, I remember the day the war was over, a lot of us left early, went swimming at the swimming pool, you know; they said, “You can go.”
Mr. Kolb: But as I understand it, there was a big party in Oak Ridge when the bomb was dropped and the news of the bomb being made here.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, I don’t remember. Maybe we weren’t back yet.
Mr. Kolb: Well you probably weren’t, yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: But I do know we rode the train, and it was loaded with soldiers, I remember that, just packed, moving troops.
Mr. Kolb: And then Y-12 changed dramatically real fast, as I understand it, in terms of activity and [population] – I mean numbers of workers, et cetera, right after the war?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, well it was – and of course they changed contractors too. Tennessee Eastman left and Carbide took over. So we changed; it changed contractors and a lot of roads. (You want some lemonade and a cookie?)
Mr. Kolb: (Got plenty. Cookies, at least. There you go.)
Mrs. Holmberg: (When we go to our grandchildren – are we on tape? They hide the cookies ’cause we give them all.) And we had four kids, and we have one that lives here in Oak Ridge. Nancy graduated from the School of Communications in Knoxville and she’s the Marketing director for Covenant’s Affiliate markets. Doug graduated from UT and he owns Bluegrass Veneer Mill Company, and it’s a subsidiary of an international company with headquarters in Sweden, so he went there last year. And Connie went out of town. She got a political science degree at Wellesley and an MBA at Harvard. She worked for NBC in New York and for Tipper Gore in Washington, and now they’re in Wisconsin, [inaudible] and she’s stayed home, mom with four boys. Her husband took a job there last year, changed jobs. And Eric, you know, he flies F-18s. He went to Vanderbilt and then he went to the Navy post graduate school in Monterey. He got an engineering degree at Vanderbilt and post grad school at Monterey Academy, aeronautical engineering, and then they sent him to test pilot school at Patuxent River, Maryland; that’s where the astronauts go. He just got back from being deployed on the Carl Vinson, where he flew missions over Afghanistan. Now he’s back in St. Louis; he’s a liaison between Boeing and the Navy. They’re bringing up a new super F-18, one a week, can you imagine that? As if we need that many.
Mr. Kolb: They probably cost a billion dollars each.
Mrs. Holmberg: He tests those. He doesn’t have to do the first testing. Boeing does it, but then he has to look at it to see if it’s –
Mr. Kolb: He’s keeping the Navy side of it, yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: For the Navy’s specifications, and then he still does some flying, then often delivers them. Most of them are going to Lemoore, California.
Mr. Kolb: You’ve got an active family then.
Mrs. Holmberg: They’re busy.
Mr. Kolb: They’re busy, but most of them are –
Mrs. Holmberg: Ten grandchildren.
Mr. Kolb: – are in this area, and St. Louis.
Mrs. Holmberg: St. Louis and, well, we’re lucky ’cause for a while we had two of them in California for several years, so it was fun to go there.
Mr. Kolb: Well sure, yeah, right. But anyway back to World War II years, Y-12 calmed down a lot, but you still worked there in the lab, right, till ’49, you said?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But the pace was a lot different, I guess, in terms of excitement. Or was it? Were you still very busy?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yes it was. I miss it, I think, but I got involved with the Children’s Playhouse. I worked on the board of the Children’s Playhouse, and senior
Playhouse.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, before you got married?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, no this was after – actually when the kids were little. Well, the pace did slow down, somewhat, but we still had our group of friends. Most of the things we did then was maybe parties at people’s houses. You didn’t go out (look at our woodpecker) we didn’t go out dancing as much or away, but it’s mostly people’s houses. We did that.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, and a lot of talented people in town, basically do interesting things.
Mrs. Holmberg: Right, and as a family we did lots of camping, ’cause we liked the outdoors.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, and good facilities around, close by.
Mrs. Holmberg: The mountains, state parks, and the national parks.
Mr. Kolb: Yep. Well, it’s an interesting area to live in, that’s for sure. If you’re healthy, there’s no limits almost.
Mrs. Holmberg: And one thing I enjoy doing, I used to, not too long ago, I worked with Anderson County Literacy Program and teaching adults, and we had mostly friends over, and I did that at Willowbrook School teaching adults to read, and we sort of worked ourselves out of a job ’cause they got proficient enough that they could go get jobs, you know. They could speak some English and learn some customs and get the jobs.
Mr. Kolb: That’s what you want.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yes, we wanted.
Mr. Kolb: That’s good, yeah, although I hear there’s more Latinos moving in. Of course, they mostly know English, I guess, but the Vietnamese, they came in during the sixties and seventies they were pretty, you know, non-literate for a while. Anyway, I think we should try to capture maybe something of the interesting incidents in your life. Can you think of unique activities or incidents or happenings, whatever, come to mind? Things that were really different, if you will.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, I’m always talking about family, but I told you when my mom retired from the plant, she suddenly got a string of horses and ponies, and our kids, she and our kids participated in the horse show circuits. I never could get really interested in that, but we furnished the kids and she furnished the horses and the expertise.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, your children were riders.
Mrs. Holmberg: Rode for her. She was in good health, but she got cancer and died at age eighty. She had won a blue ribbon at the fair in Knoxville in the Autumn before she died the next year, so she was a very active gal and that was a big part of our life. And scouting, the kids got a lot of benefits from the scouting program.
Mr. Kolb: One thing I didn’t know about till I talked to Grady Whitman, he said that he was in the SED unit, Special Engineering Detachment, and he said there was a very active athletic program through the SED. They had their own football team, their own basketball team –
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, they had a basketball team and a something team.
Mr. Kolb: And they played, you know, other teams in the area during World War II.
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: I mean, I never knew about that.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah there was.
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever see any of their games?
Mrs. Holmberg: Actually, I dated a guy who was on the basketball team, SED basketball.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, was Bob not a basketball player, your husband? He’s pretty tall.
Mrs. Holmberg: No he’s not coordinated. He once coached a church basketball team, but he never played. And they had a – I know they had a softball or a baseball and a basketball team ’cause I’ve gone on picnics and parties with the basketball. And they’ve had some SED reunions. We went to the first few. Actually, there were so many people from K-25 that we didn’t know. We sort of got to be a captive audience witnessing everybody’s personal history all afternoon. The first we went to was a resort in Gatlinburg with rocking chairs in the front porch and dinner there. It was an overnight affair, so it was fabulous, you know, you could mingle with everybody. Then it got to the point where it’s just all go in a room and listen.
Mr. Kolb: So you weren’t aware of that athletic activity?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, and I wasn’t aware of that for a long time. And that was in addition to the high school athletics of course, right? That was also present.
Mrs. Holmberg: Of course, there wasn’t a girls basketball team at the high school, and when our daughter – our daughter is six feet tall and she played in the church league – but there wasn’t a high school ball team. I don’t know when they first started basketball at the high school, but –
Mr. Kolb: Well, it was quite a while, yeah. I don’t know, it was seventies? I just don’t know, but it was a long time. Well I’m sure you had a lot of exciting dates, you know, with all these different characters around here, all these different fellows. Bob’s from Iowa, and who knows who else you dated. I mean, you could play the field and have a lot of fun.
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh, you could, because in the building I worked in there weren’t many women and most everybody was here right out of college, unattached, so they were looking for somebody to go out with, and so it wasn’t hard to find a boyfriend.
Mr. Kolb: And the tennis court dances were popular and outdoors and rec centers and all.
Mrs. Holmberg: And Bob likes to tell the story of how we met. I told you I had a friend from Chicago that was a very close friend of mine. He was dating somebody and they broke up, so he wanted to – no, I guess I had broken up. He wanted a car, so he introduced me to Bob so we could double date and have a car to leave Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: The car was the object, not the date.
Mrs. Holmberg: The car was the object, ’cause cars were very scarce. Most people that came here didn’t have a car. They were hard to get and they normally didn’t have the money to buy them with either. We only had one car, so carpools were very common to nursery school, dance class, whatever, and Bob was in a five man carpool most of the time. I mean, right in this neighborhood there were five people. Except I guess near the end, he got tired of that.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but you could always take the bus to get around, you know, if you wanted to, during wartime.
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right. Actually they took those city buses out in about ’54.
Mr. Kolb: That’s the year I came, yeah. I rode it one time to work.
Mrs. Holmberg: Because I remember saying to Nancy, you know, they’re taking the buses out. Let’s take the bus downtown, so she could ride on the bus, and she was two years old in ’54.
Mr. Kolb: It’s amazing they lasted that long, in a way, but the federal government was paying for it I’m sure, I assume.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yes, they seemed to hire anybody who came down the pike. And there’s a saying there’s still bitterness from people who lived here that had to move. But I think once they settled in and got jobs and probably [were] better off, property values went up. In fact, that was one of the problems that we had is that we got paid such a paltry sum that you couldn’t go out and buy – and I don’t know how my folks got the money to buy the place. I never knew. It didn’t look to me like they were making much money, but they did it somehow.
Mr. Kolb: As I understand it, the value you were given was so much per acre and the value of the house and the farm wasn’t even really included, so, you know, you really lost the value of your house, of your buildings, sounds like. [Is] that the way you understand it?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, I know John Rice Irwin talked about in an article that he’s written, I guess, in These Are Our Voices, talks about all the buildings they had, and his parents’ house. His grandparents’ house was a lovely place out in the area of the Marina. It was a big old Victorian house, and most of the houses were pretty nice. They were frame houses, two-story, you know, not any log cabins.
Mr. Kolb: And they were all bulldozed, basically.
Mrs. Holmberg: They were all bulldozed.
Mr. Kolb: Now there’s one house down on the east end of the turnpike – is it just outside Elza Gate – that’s an old, old house.
Mrs. Holmberg: It’s a brick house.
Mr. Kolb: Right. Is it authentic? I mean pre-World War II house?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, but it wasn’t there very long before – you know, the Red Cross building on the turnpike was a pre –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I didn’t know it was a pre-war. I thought, well, I didn’t know that.
Mrs. Holmberg: And of course the –
Mr. Kolb: What was it used for?
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh, it was somebody’s house.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, somebody’s house, okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: And Kim Son Restaurant was my uncle’s grocery store.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it was the old Crossroads Tavern before that, right.
Mrs. Holmberg: And, let’s see, oh, over by the old Holiday Inn where the weather station is, that’s a pre-Oak Ridge house.
Mr. Kolb: Where NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] is? That building or – I didn’t know that. I knew it was World War II, but I didn’t know it predated.
Mrs. Holmberg: It predated Manhattan Project.
Mr. Kolb: Is it a big home? I mean, it’s a pretty good size building; it must have been a huge house.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well are we talking about the same place? I know the weather station. Is it NOAA? The weather station’s in it now.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah the NOAA research, yeah, okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, yeah, the neighbor across the street.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, yeah, I knew it was. I didn’t know it predated Oak Ridge, I mean, World War II. Well, that’s interesting. I’ve seen it right there. But I didn’t know about the Red Cross. I was told [the] Red Cross building was used as a, what do you call it, where people got their housing? A housing office, I was told, during World War II.
Mrs. Holmberg: It may have been.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, any other interesting incidents you might think of during World War II or maybe before you might want to contribute?
Mrs. Holmberg: Can’t think of anything very outstanding.
Mr. Kolb: You already admitted to breaking the rules on the beach at St. Augustine, you know, lived through that.
Mrs. Holmberg: No, I think I was a pretty good guy. Well, when they asked me to send in those Acme cards, you know, I never, never told anybody. I would drop them in the mailbox so they wouldn’t see in the mail collection.
Mr. Kolb: It was an Acme card?
Mrs. Holmberg: It was an Acme Credit Company, but it was going into security. I mean, that was the name of the address where these were picked up in a post office box. I never told anybody that I was doing that. They asked me not to. But I didn’t see anything.
Mr. Kolb: Well, they were asking you to record incidents?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, asked me to report if I saw anything suspicious.
Mr. Kolb: Unusual.
Mrs. Holmberg: Every week, I had to send one in.
Mr. Kolb: Every week?
Mrs. Holmberg: Uh-huhn.
Mr. Kolb: Just through –
Mrs. Holmberg: Gave me a whole stack of envelopes.
Mr. Kolb: Everybody got those?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, just, I never saw – I don’t know who had one.
Mr. Kolb: You know why you were picked?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, I don’t know why I was picked. They just called me up one day and asked me to come and talk to them about it, at the Castle on the Hill, and if I would do it.
Mr. Kolb: Let me ask you one thing. There were black people living and working in the project, of course. Did you ever meet any of them during the war? I mean have any social interactions? I mean, probably not, but I mean maybe.
Mrs. Holmberg: No, we had a dishwasher in the lab who washed the beakers and glassware, but didn’t see them socially. Now our kids did, you know, Ronnie Griffin, and –
Mr. Kolb: In school.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, in school.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause the schools were integrated by that time.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah. Yeah, I guess they were. When she got into high school – of course, they weren’t integrated when they were little, because they tried to help integrate the skating rink. They weren’t allowed there, and so they said you had to be a member to skate, and the only way you could come in there as a new skater is if you were sponsored by – so our kids – they were going to Unitarian Church – so a group, three or four kids, several kids took black members with them to skate, and they wouldn’t let them in. And then they put our kids’ names on the bulletin board that weren’t allowed to skate again.
Mr. Kolb: Blacklisted. They were non-membered.
Mrs. Holmberg: They were non-members that weren’t allowed to come in. And they actually closed their doors without – in fact, our daughter just gave a talk the other day. If you’re [a] pre-Oak Ridger, you get asked to talk. Well, she was talking about the educational opportunities for women now for University Women’s Association. She had done some research, and two places that were the hardest to integrate was barbershops and hair salons and laundromats, they were the last to give in. And the skating rink closed their doors.
Mr. Kolb: Is that the one here in Oak Ridge? ’Cause it’s lasted a long time.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah it was; it was down here at Jefferson Circle.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I was thinking of the one out there east, on the east end of town, the skating rink.
Mrs. Holmberg: No this was down at Jefferson Circle.
Mr. Kolb: That was a long time ago, yeah, okay, I see.
Mrs. Holmberg: No, I’m sorry, it was on the turnpike about where –
Mr. Kolb: Near Jefferson Avenue.
Mrs. Holmberg: Where that bank is, that is closed.
Mr. Kolb: Right, yeah, that would be right at the corner, yeah, used to be.
Mrs. Holmberg: In fact the Ku Klux Klan – maybe you’ve heard this at one of the ORICL [Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning] classes – the Ku Klux Klan came. They had brought them in, down at Jefferson Circle. There’s a Y[WCA] here, and the black folks and the supporters of the black folks stayed in this triangle while the Ku Klux Klan marched around. But there were no incidents. Nobody got violent. Of course, it was closely watched, I think.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, when was that, do you have any idea when that was?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, I don’t know. They had a couple of black ladies and friends over, and [they] were on a panel that I heard talk about that.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but Oak Ridge is just like any other community with segregated housing – that black kids had to go to separate schools. Everything was really separate.
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right, and the high school kids had to go to Knoxville. The Scarboro School was a black [school]. You know, UT had a farm office there.
Mr. Kolb: That was the black elementary school?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, that was a local elementary school. That’s a pre-Oak Ridge building too. And I think that’s why they called the village down there Scarboro, because that’s not really Scarboro as I knew it. Scarboro is out by the –
Mr. Kolb: Right, on Bethel Valley road.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well out at the end of Raccoon Valley Road, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Well, was that name, Scarboro, was [that] just a family name for that locality?
Mrs. Holmberg: I don’t know. Our mailing address for all this area was Edgemoor.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, it was?
Mrs. Holmberg: The post office was Edgemoor. Edgemoor is –
Mr. Kolb: I never knew that. So that was another community?
Mrs. Holmberg: Edgemoor is across the – let’s see, how can I tell you – oh, when you take a road to Pellissippi, if you turn right, you go to Pellissippi; if you turn left, you go to Edgemoor. It’s not there anymore, I think, but that’s where the post office was, in that area.
Mr. Kolb: So it’s east, east of Oak Ridge. Around the east end of Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah. It was actually outside of the area that was incorporated.
Mr. Kolb: I’m trying to think – what’s the name of the – Paul Elza. Where does that name come from? Was that Paul Elza, Elza Gate?
Mrs. Holmberg: I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: You don’t know.
Mrs. Holmberg: Now, Robertsville –
Mr. Kolb: But, I’ve heard that name, Paul Elza, and the gate was named, it was a gate on the east end, right?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well there was an Elza community there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: There was an Elza community, and there were – you’ve heard of notorious Nash Copeland stories, the pictures and stuff he was in.
Mr. Kolb: Notorious?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, I mean, it’s well known. And his brother, Glenn Copeland, ran a grocery store out at Elza Gate in the Elza community. The two brothers had stores.
Mr. Kolb: And Nash Copeland had the gas station and general store, kind of.
Mrs. Holmberg: And then on the corner of Robertsville, where Kim Son is, my uncle’s grocery store was on this corner, and on the corner across the road, there was a grocery store run by Key, a man named Bill Key. So there were two stores and [a] gas station and various and sundry things, you know. You could probably buy a lamp, clothes, and stuff. And then there weren’t any more stores on this Robertsville Road until you get down near Wheat, you know. The little communities had stores and churches and schools.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but I’ve been told by some people who were really outsiders that when they went to Knoxville to shop or whatever, they were looked down upon or [that there was] jealousy between the locals in Knoxville or Clinton and people out here in the project. As a native, did you have any experience like that?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, I never experienced that, no. I never saw that. I mean, I don’t know how they’d know you’re from Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Well, the saying was, the women had to wear galoshes and then take those off and put shoes on, because of the mud.
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh, so they – right, okay.
Mr. Kolb: And Oak Ridgers were tracking mud around.
Mrs. Holmberg: And also it might be that they recognized they weren’t native by the way they spoke, too.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that’s another clue to stores, yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: And maybe they recognized me as a native, and –
Mr. Kolb: But you didn’t feel any feeling about –
Mrs. Holmberg: No.
Mr. Kolb: That’s good. Some people did, some people did not. But anything else?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, we shopped a lot with friends, and I really never experienced it. I don’t know of any friends who did, but I’m sure it could happen, because there was bitterness even though it certainly improved the economy in this area, and improved their business in the stores, I’m sure.
[break in recording]
Mrs. Holmberg: I said you covered a broad range of descriptions of how things were before, during, and after. That’s a nice connection. It’s all nice. I mean, I enjoyed – I was lonesome when school was out, and I didn’t want school to be out when I was in grade school cause all my friends scattered everywhere, you know.
Mrs. Garland: It was a long way to go play with your friends, wasn’t it?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, not really. Actually, our houses were pretty close together, you know, just a fence between.
Mr. Kolb: Just a –
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, but my mom, you know, when we lived here, there were kids in the neighborhood, and Connie would say, “Bye, I’m going to Ella’s.” So I’d say, “Okay.” But my mom and most of the people didn’t do that. You didn’t go unless you were invited, you know, so you didn’t feel free to just run next door or up the street or someplace unless they asked you. And maybe they didn’t –
Mrs. Garland: Which made it very inconvenient, because you didn’t have telephones, even.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, that may not be completely the truth. [It] just might have been my mom’s attitude, you know. Like here, ’cause we all sort of came up together with having kids and there’s hardly any kids in the neighborhood, but it used to be full, you know, to have a football game in the yard, and kids going to the creek, and they had lots to do. And I didn’t have that much to do, so I got sort of lonesome. But my grandfather was a lot of fun, so I hung around with him on the farm; my dad was away at work.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right. Well, you know, it was a small family, had to become more dependent on other kids, you’re right, yeah. When you talk to Colleen Black, she’s one of eight, one of ten – she had eight children. She’s one of ten. No problem having –
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, the challenge was finding a place where you didn’t have people.
Mr. Kolb: Having kids, yeah, right, how to get privacy.
Mrs. Holmberg: Have you seen that slide that she made with all of them in bed?
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF REBA HOLMBERG
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
with Anne Garland
April 30, 2002
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: We’re at Reba Holmberg’s home and she’s going to be giving us her oral history. I’m Jim Kolb and also here is Anne Garland as an observer and helper. So, Reba, let���s get started by first having you tell us how and why you came to early Oak Ridge during World War II.
Mrs. Holmberg: I came to Oak Ridge just out of college with a degree with Human Ecology and went to work in an analytical laboratory with Tennessee Eastman at Building 9733-1 in Y-12.
Mr. Kolb: When was that?
Mrs. Holmberg: 1943.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, early.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah. In the fall of ’43, right. And I worked there for about six years, because in those days when you got married you went home, you quit your job and went home to – all our friends seemed to do that. We didn’t have kids for a couple years, but I never went back to work until several years later when our last kid was in school, and then I was an instructional aide at Linden Elementary School for about ten years, half day.
Mr. Kolb: With whom and for whom did you work at Y-12 in the Chemistry Lab?
Mrs. Holmberg: You mean who was the – Charles Susano, S-U-S-A-N-O. He was the building director, building supervisor. The first guy who was there in the very beginning, his name was Miller. I don’t remember his first name, but he came here from California and early on, I think, when the war was over, he went back to California and then Suzy took over at that time.
Mr. Kolb: How big a group were you in?
Mrs. Holmberg: How big of a group?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well it was – I worked in a lab with about six people, I guess, but in the building there were probably fifty or more that interacted, different projects, I mean. I would get samples from another lab and/or run a spectrograph from another, go to another lab to do that, so it was all interactive.
Mr. Kolb: I see. Probably good job for a young woman scientist.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, I wasn’t really a scientist. I’d only had two years of chemistry, and as I said, my mom was working there as a chaufferette, and she – it was a car pool, and those people who were qualified to have a car to drive them safe from building to building, or plant to plant, or she even took them out of town, so she came in contact with people who were in position to give me a job, and she got to know them pretty well, so she kept asking, telling them my daughter is coming out of school and she’s looking for a job and one day one of them said, well has she had chemistry? And she said yes, so –
Mr. Kolb: The rare find.
Mrs. Holmberg: A week later – in fact I’m not sure they took very long to clear me, because I had hardly been out of my own back yard – so –
Mr. Kolb: You got clearance in a week?
Mrs. Holmberg: I don’t remember. It didn’t take long to clear me. Oh, I don’t think I got it in a week. I remember I had to go to Wheat in that old school there to work on the indoctrination and clearance.
Mr. Kolb: So did you have any training outside of Y-12 before you got into the job?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well they trained me on the job.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, you know, things I didn’t know, they would train me and show me how to do it, and so a lot of it was routine ’cause I’d be testing fluids from the – what was the thing that all the gals sat at and turned knobs?
Mr. Kolb: Calutrons.
Mrs. Holmberg: I guess so. Anyway I got those samples to test for water, and I don’t remember, but that was a job I had to do every morning, to test that. And then it was very crowded, lots of people in the lab in the early days, so sometimes I didn’t have anything to do and they were after me to move over so they’d have my desk to work, it was so crowded.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my, lot of fast pace in other words.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, and the GI’s were coming too, SEDs, Special Engineer Detachment and so we’d get a new group of those and have to move over and make room for them.
Mr. Kolb: Analytical work also?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, right. We had about three gals who were Ph.D. chemists in the building. Most of us were – most of the people were professional chemists; there were a few of us who weren’t.
Mr. Kolb: Right, but you had enough background you could do the job.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, I could do it. I mean I could titrate and do equations and things like that.
Mr. Kolb: But you never heard the word uranium or plutonium, so what did they tell you, what kind of –
Mrs. Holmberg: They called it tuballoy, and when you used it in the equation you used the word T, but you used the periodic table number that calls for uranium.
Mr. Kolb: 92.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, 92, and I think I’ve told you I was using it, and I thought, ��What is this T stuff?’ So I looked on the table and it was uranium, but my job wasn’t so important that they [thought] that I could figure out what was going on, so they didn’t bother to tell me. And so that night I had a date with a guy who did know what was going on, and in a public place I said, “Oh I learned what T is today. It’s uranium,” and he became very agitated, “Oh, don’t say that where people can hear you!��� So why didn’t they tell me not to say it?
Mr. Kolb: Oh, they didn’t tell you not to? Well, of course, they never told you what T was.
Mrs. Holmberg: They never told me what T was, and I guess they didn’t think I was going to figure it out.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, yeah, but you figured it out, as other people did too. As a chemist, yeah, that’s kind of a dead giveaway, 92; and there it is, what can you say? Well that brings the secrecy issue up. I mean, did you have any knowledge or feeling about being scrutinized by the FBI or security people?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, actually I was. I don’t know what they call him. I did cooperate with the security. At one time, they moved that building, the people in that building up behind the Castle on the Hill, those buildings that are behind the Castle –
Mr. Kolb: The training buildings?
Mrs. Holmberg: For the [inaudible] group up there, and of course we were right across the street from the Castle on the Hill, and one day I got this phone call and I recognized that he was an important person. I can’t remember who he was, but I knew who he was and he said, “I need to talk to you. Leave the lab and don’t tell anybody that you’re coming, just come. It won’t take long, but just find a convenient time to walk out, and I’d like to talk to you.” So I thought, gonna get a promotion or I’m gonna get fired or who knows. Well what it was, they needed to have people to keep their ears open and I had to send in a report every week and I still have an envelope, ACME Credit Company with a Knoxville address, and let them know if I had seen anything suspicious, and I never did. They were all hard working people forever. The only time that I knew that security was breeched – I sometimes got called up to work in the office when the secretary – I couldn’t type but I could answer the phone, and sometimes he’d call me out of the lab to take her place. She was pregnant and sick a lot, but I guess she was there that day, because this guy had just gotten married. He was on deferment to work there, and he had just gotten married and he said, “Gee, I wish I could bring my wife in to meet all these people, all my friends.” Well, we had to take samples back and forth to Y-12, so we had a truck driver who gave you a ride with a guard, and then we had a guard on the gate to get into the building. Well the truck driver guard was sitting there in the office, and the secretary stupidly said, “Oh, I’ll let you borrow my badge.” So rather than tell her, “You can’t do this; that’s a no-no,” he tracked her, and when they came in the first gate, of course, the guard was waiting for them. So he was ushered out that very afternoon, got fired, and probably had to go with the Army, ’cause he was on deferment. So that’s the only time I know. It wasn’t serious, but it was a breach of security.
Mr. Kolb: It was a rule that was broken.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, it was a rule that was broken. It was a very stupid thing to do, but you sometimes get complacent.
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t make the same mistake twice.
Mrs. Holmberg: “Just do it,” you know, like, “Bring her in. We all want to meet her.”
Mr. Kolb: But, I mean, were you aware? I guess you were aware there were security people around.
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh yes, oh yes, I mean, all the signs all over the plants and on the highways about zipping your lip, and I didn’t know what I was protecting, but I learned. I mean I talked to Bob about it, and even he didn’t –
Mr. Kolb: Your husband?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, he didn’t even tell me what was going on; he didn’t even spill the beans too.
Mr. Kolb: I see, but he did know, or he knew at the time?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, he knew. Well he knew, early on he suspected it, ’cause he was working on the same project at Ames [Laboratory], and he read an article in the Saturday Evening Post about fission, so he decided that he was going to read more about it, so he went to the library, and all the books were in the boundary. They had taken all the library books concerning fission out of the library, and then the guy, his professor, that he worked for there said, “Well, Bob, we’re working on the same types of things they are in Oak Ridge,” so he knew when he came. Actually he worked at Castle on the Hill as a G.I., and he didn’t go in the labs until the war was over.
Mr. Kolb: Well, we were sort of jumping ahead. Tell us a little bit about your family history from this area too, background.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, I had this genealogy report at – well, let me say that I’m Reba Holmberg, the daughter of Lula and Andy Justice, Lula Jet and Andy Justice, and Lula was the daughter of James and Clara Jet, who was the daughter of Isabella and Alex Lockett who lived in Scarboro. Well, Scarboro is actually at the end of – right across from the Arboretum is where they lived. And my other grandparents, Tolbert and Louisa Jet, lived in a house where Willowbrook School is, on that very hill, lived in a house there.
Mr. Kolb: Both had farms.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yes, it was all farming. There were people who left the area to have jobs, but here it was farming, not very big farms, mostly subsistence farming, no big – no money crops except for tobacco, and my grandfather sold some cattle. And then my grandparents, Jim and Clara Jett, lived right here on the corner of Louisiana and Robertsville, and their strip of land around here, from about where Bruner’s is up to the top of the ridge, and then my dad, strip of land around, right beside it. My mom was an only child so she sort of stuck with her family. Actually, when they left Oak Ridge they still bought places side by side. And I had one sister –
Mr. Kolb: Did she work in Oak Ridge too?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, she died, she died young.
Mr. Kolb: No other siblings then?
Mrs. Holmberg: No.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: And in this valley, there were most of my grandfather’s brothers and sisters. You know, he had two brothers and two sisters and all, and their families all lived within a few miles of each other. Actually, where the Country Club is, down beside the old Girl Scout camp, that house stayed there for a long time, where one of his sisters lived. I don’t know if you remember it, but it was a –
Mr. Kolb: I remember the Girl Scout camp.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, or at the Girl Scout – but a big two-story frame house, and they used it for some things and they finally tore it down. And then, his – well, we lived almost next door to each other, or right in this area.
Mr. Kolb: So you had a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles –
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: – sounds like.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yes, that’s right, and a very extended family because my mom was an only child and there are only two of us, so I had two sets of parents. My mom was an outdoors person. She was a horse woman. She always had horses and rode horses, so she didn’t particularly care for the duties of the house, so my grandmother had to cook for the field hands, you know, so she always had this big lunch or big dinner. It was dinner, at mealtime, it was, you know, the people working the farm got fed too, so I’d always go there for lunch.
Mr. Kolb: To your grandmother’s.
Mrs. Holmberg: To my grandmother’s, who lived next door.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you just walked over.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, we lived side by side.
Mr. Kolb: Then you went to work for college at UT [University of Tennessee]?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, I graduated high school, Robertsville High School, which is Robertsville Middle School now, and most of that building’s been torn down except the auditorium was our new gym. It is still standing. And then I went to UT and then came back and went to work.
Mr. Kolb: There was that – how many other girls your age went to UT? Was that kind of rare or –
Mrs. Holmberg: There were eighteen of us in my graduating class –
Mr. Kolb: Of Robertsville?
Mrs. Holmberg: Robertsville. It was first grade – didn’t have kindergarten – first grade through twelfth, all in that one building and there were eighteen people in our graduating class. And I know three of the boys went to UT, and I went to UT, and one of the gals went someplace else. I don’t remember where she went. So there were about five of us out of the graduating class.
Mr. Kolb: Two girls and three boys.
Mrs. Holmberg: Three boys.
Mr. Kolb: So it was kind of rare, at that time, to go to college.
Mrs. Holmberg: I guess so.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, good, and so here you’re in Oak Ridge. Where did you live when you first got your job? Of course, your home is gone.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well they bought a farm just over the ridge out by Norwood, by the shopping center. Oh, do you know where the –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, towards Oliver Springs.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah towards Oliver Springs, the Covenant Oliver Springs Clinic. We still own that farm, and we sold them that corner to build, and our house was on that corner where the clinic is now.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well just north a little ways, yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, cause my folks were gone and –
Mr. Kolb: Your folks were gone?
Mrs. Holmberg: They were at the time that they bought the clinic; they had died. The realtor said, “You know, if [a] family member wants to fix it up and live there, that would be fine, but [it would be] too expensive to fix all the repairs and rent it out, you know, too much of a hassle.” So we were glad to have them come and tear it down.
Mr. Kolb: But I guess we should talk about the process of being evicted and your family being evicted then and having to move.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well my grandfather came home one day and found this. It doesn’t say you should leave immediately, I don’t think, but this on the door. Everybody has – a lot of people have those little things they fill out.
Mr. Kolb: No, it doesn’t say how long you’ve got. I’ve heard the number, two weeks.
Mrs. Holmberg: Okay here it says, here it is. This is the one that says.
Mr. Kolb: Okay another one. It still doesn’t say how long you had to get out did it?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, it just said vacate immediately.
Mr. Kolb: Immediately, but like I say, I’ve heard it was two weeks was what they wanted.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well you know I think the place where they needed urgently to have people out, maybe they did that, like maybe where they were putting the plants, but where we lived it –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, it varied with location, okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: Varied. Where we lived, they started on the other end, ripping the landscape apart and putting houses, and that was where a housing area was. So they never gave it any hassle, but my grandfather knew it was coming, and he already had his eye on a place.
Mr. Kolb: How did he?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, just gossip in the neighborhood.
Mr. Kolb: Oh.
Mrs. Holmberg: You know, like Bill said they’d built a railroad spur and then surveyors were in here.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, in late ’42, when they started doing activities.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, and then they heard that this was coming. In fact some people had already gotten notices, so he’d begun looking already, and he had found this place. So when he got his notice, he went over and sealed the deal so we’d, except for moving everything, and that was thing that was hard, they wouldn’t let you move anything that was nailed down, you know, and I think they moved in January, and it was kind of hard to –
Mr. Kolb: January of ’43?
Mrs. Holmberg: ’42, I guess, ’43?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, started in September of ’42, so it would have been ’43.
Mrs. Holmberg: Okay, so it was pretty hard to get everything, but as I said, I wasn’t here; I was in and out. But I don’t remember seeing the trucks come and go and moving the household stuff and things like that.
Mr. Kolb: And a lot of other people in the same area were moving at the same time too.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, some of our relatives moved to Knoxville, Andersonville, and all around the area.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but you were sort of fortunate you didn’t go very far.
Mrs. Holmberg: So to get back to your question, I lived at home.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, you stayed at home.
Mrs. Holmberg: And my mom worked at Y-12 also, so we rode together.
Mr. Kolb: And what did you father do? Did he just work at the farm?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yes, he worked for Stone & Webster; he was in security. And my mom worked for Tennessee Eastman as a chaufferette, and I don’t really know what my grandparents did, but they even had jobs. But I picked up, when I took things off the farm after everybody was gone, I took this little thing, little box because I thought it was so pretty, and I found paycheck stubs and all sorts of things that told me they had jobs too. I don’t think they worked long, but they did go work.
Mr. Kolb: About what age where they? In their sixties do you think?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well my dad ���
Mr. Kolb: I mean, your grandparents.
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh, my grandparents –
Mr. Kolb: Could’ve been –
Mrs. Holmberg: You don’t want me to go through these papers, do you?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well, they were in good health, enough to work, obviously.
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh yeah, they were healthy.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that’s all right don’t go –
Mrs. Holmberg: I was very fortunate. Most of my relatives lived to be quite old and did not have any debilitating disease. They went sort of suddenly with a heart stroke.
Mr. Kolb: So you lived on the farm, and how long did you stay with your parents on the farm then?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, from ’43 to when we were married in ’50. Then when I married Bob, we moved, we got a house in Oak Ridge, and we lived first in a block house in Woodland and, ’cause we weren’t eligible for cemestos – they’d become very popular then, and you had to have kids to get extra rooms – so we lived in Woodland and then they built some private houses, still government subsidized out on East Drive. We lived there, and then we bought this house. We moved in – we built it in 1960. So we’ve lived here the whole time.
Mr. Kolb: Good, so you were really kind of just on the edge, not in the community per se. Did you get involved in any of the activities in town, in the Oak Ridge government, ’cause you’d come into Oak Ridge, just come back and forth?
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh yeah, ’cause we had passes ’cause we were –
Mr. Kolb: You had passes, you had to come.
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh, yes, I came in all the time.
Mr. Kolb: Did you ride the bus to work?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, car. I drove my – mom drove; we drove our family car.
Mr. Kolb: To work?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, it’s almost as close to Y-12 from where they are. It’s just five minutes on the other side of Outer Drive, so we drove to Y-12 every day.
Ann Garland: Was your mother’s car part of her job? Did she drive her car?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, not her private car – they had their own cars – but the company, government issue cars.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, the reason I ask is, I heard so much about the bus system and how many people rode buses everywhere, you know, you didn’t have to have a car almost, but you had a car so –
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, well, in fact they had people working around the clock, and they asked me to take an evening shift and I said, I’ve got no way to get to work ’cause I ride with my mom, and they bought it. I didn’t have to do shift work.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, but you could have gotten a ride on the bus, I betcha.
Mrs. Holmberg: Probably.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause I know of people, I heard of people that came in, you know, from that area on a bus, to go to work.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, we went to, I know if you’ve heard of Whittle Springs, but that used to be the popular place to go dancing.
Mr. Kolb: In Knoxville.
Mrs. Holmberg: In Knoxville. And, speaking of Fred, we were over there with Fred Nelson one night at a party at Whittle Springs, and his car died pretty close to the Southern Depot. And do you know that we could – just hopped on a bus. They were coming out of Knoxville at one o’clock in the morning. I don’t know how we knew about it, but we got a free bus from Knoxville back home and left the car there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, so Fred Nelson was here during the war too?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know that, okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, he and Bob worked together.
Mr. Kolb: Well, okay. Then, going back to – did you have any recreational activities in town that you took advantage of while you were single?
Mrs. Holmberg: We went – well, we had a lot of friends, and we would collect friends and go to Big Ridge or to the Smokies, and we went to dances. We were very early members of the Playhouse and Symphony and Duplicate Bridge and –
Mr. Kolb: Now these friends –
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh, a couple of clubs I belonged to, one was a sitters club which was interesting because –
Mr. Kolb: Unmarried women do the sitting?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, it was families, and you were in a pool, and you would sit for another family. I’d say there was twenty of us, and they kept records, and somebody would say, “I need somebody to stay with my kids Thursday night,” so you’d go stay there Thursday night for four hours, and then you could call and then somebody in the club would come and stay like –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, swap out, yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: Swap. And then I belonged to, I guess it’s College Women’s Club, which was active, pretty active. We did – yeah, it was not, you know, Association of University Women, we made up our own name, I think, College Women’s Club, and we had one philanthropic project. We did a scholarship and we did volunteer babysitting. I don’t know why, but we did for maybe people who needed our – I can’t remember why we did it, but occasionally we did volunteer.
Mr. Kolb: Well, not everyone was in a club, so maybe they couldn’t afford it, or something like that.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, it wasn���t among our members; it was people in the community.
Mr. Kolb: And babies were coming right and left, as I understand it.
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: The hospital was kicking up babies by the dozen.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, my water broke with our second child on Friday, so of course they put me to bed in the hospital, and Dr. Pugh said, “Well, I don’t want to induce labor today, because we’ve got so many people back there; we’ll wait till in the morning.” So Saturday morning I got ready to go, and by that time it was crowded again, but it was too late.
Mr. Kolb: Some things you can’t put off for very long.
Mrs. Holmberg: Right. Some of the things you might like to know is about what we did here in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah that’s right, you mentioned the Playhouse, the Symphony –
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, I��m talking about pre-Oak Ridge, okay?
Mr. Kolb: Oh, pre-Oak Ridge, okay, right, yeah, good. ’Cause when you went to high school there was a community there too in Robertsville area.
Mrs. Holmberg: Right. Robertsville school served all twelve grades, mostly two grades to a room. Teachers were not required to have certificates; often a conference with a school official was all that was required. In early years, children often left school as soon as they learned to read and write and maybe didn’t go at all. My mother said she rode her pony to school. A shed that was provided for the animals protected them during the day. Each teacher – there were probably fifteen or more in the class. While I was in high school in the late thirties, there were eighteen people in my graduation class, probably less than a hundred people in the whole high school. Choice of subjects was limited. We had morning and afternoon recess and one hour for lunch. No lunches were served. Boiled corn, baked sweet potatoes in whatever form children brought came in lunch buckets from home. All kids through first grade were let out at the same time on the playground breaks and no teacher was inside. If problems came up, they were solved with the help of older children. A teacher would be called in case of emergency. The school was heated by a coal furnace, steam radiator, and in very cold weather, the pipes would burst enough that we’d have an extra winter vacation. Every morning, school started with the sound of a huge bell that the principal kicked on the front porch. We lined up according to rooms, marched in to a rousing rendition of A Country Garden – I’ll never forget that – on the piano, and Chapel followed, and devotionals, group song and other special events. They would let – every morning they would let kids do anything that – there were a lot of self-taught musicians, like somebody would play a banjo and somebody would do a fiddle, or somebody would do a reading or –
Mr. Kolb: This is a sharing time.
Mrs. Holmberg: Sing a song if you wanted, felt like you wanted to sing something or bring a guitar or play your fiddle or do some reading, dramatic, some kids took dramatic reading classes, so that was –
Mr. Kolb: Encouraged?
Mrs. Holmberg: We had outside toilets and had to meander down the path to the edge of the woods.
Mr. Kolb: Are you serious?
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh no, we got plumbing in the gym.
Mr. Kolb: But I mean, no outdoor commodes?
Mrs. Holmberg: Pit toilets, oh, we had pit toilets. Yeah, I didn’t make that clear. No we had toilets; we had proper chemical pit toilets. Electricity came in 1935. Spring houses and ice boxes were used until this time. My dad maintained a three miles line of – ’cause he needed it for his business, a phone in the area. We lived here [refers to map], and he ran a line, built it himself from where Kim Son’s Restaurant is [171 Robertsville Road], ’cause that building was my uncle’s grocery store in those days, and he maintained that line and people used to come from miles to – emergencies to call a doctor or something like that. My grandmother peddled produce, eggs, garden vegetables. Some people had jobs at the Clinton Knitting Mill, or the L&N railroad, school teaching, my dad had a coal and ice business, but most jobs were in farming. And my folks lived – well this is the swimming pool and the house where they lived was up by the swimming pool. My grandparents –
Mr. Kolb: Pretty good size; it’s a lake, like a pond.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yes, it was a cow pond.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, it was dammed up for – deep enough to swim in, I guess.
Mrs. Holmberg: I don’t have it – there was a big Victorian house there at Grove Center. I don’t know if you remember that house.
Mr. Kolb: Grove Center, near the Swimming pool?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Is this where the, where our present swimming pool is?
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, that’s spring fed.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, yeah, I didn’t realize you meant that, okay. There was a house there – let’s see, not – you mean before the pool, before the swimming pool was put in?
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, that’s okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: I’m sorry.
Mr. Kolb: Well was this a relative or a –
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, my grandparents lived there. In fact, back – my mother was married on the front porch of that house, and she was an only child, and during World War I she ran the tractor and did a lot of things. My dad served in World War I in France, and he was wounded in Argonne Forest and got out a little early, I think, because of that.
Mr. Kolb: But he survived.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, he survived; he was wounded in the arm. He had a big scar for a long time, I mean, still, the rest of his life, but he was sent to the south of France to recover and somebody liked his attitude or something because they didn’t want to send him back. They needed him there, so he didn’t have to go back to that awful battle at Verdun, so it maybe saved his life, by getting that shot in the arm.
Mr. Kolb: That happened a lot, yeah. Some men would rather have a minor wound and get out than have the chance of something really terrible happening.
Mrs. Holmberg: And social life, mostly get together with family and friends, family reunion. And, as I say, people were self-taught with their instruments and one of the most common things was [to] get together with an evening of music-making with freezers of homemade ice cream and cookies, you know. Somebody would make a freezer of ice cream and say, “Can you come and play your fiddle or your guitar?” or maybe three or so, and then they would come in. And of course, ladies would piece quilts and play cards. And my dad had a truck or so, and he often took it to the park in Knoxville for Fourth of July. It was not a covered truck, and if it rained, we couldn’t go. But hay down and quilts, and it was really a hayride and –
Mr. Kolb: The children would ride in the back?
Mrs. Holmberg: Everybody, the adults and children; it was a big truck, so maybe ten, fifteen people. Or you also took them to the skating rink in Knoxville too.
Mr. Kolb: Outdoor bus.
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right. As I said, if it rained, we always – you know, Fourth of July it often rains ’cause it’s that time of – kind of weather here, and we couldn’t go if it was raining. The county agent – you know, you’ve heard of home demonstration, 4-H clubs – they were very active, and a lot of the ladies liked that they learned new skills, and she’d come out once a month. We drove to Knoxville many times a year to shop, especially at Christmas when the tobacco crops had had been sold and there would be extra money for Christmas shopping. Basketball games were a big draw ’cause we had a lot of competition with Wheat and Clinton, and we would go on a school bus to the surrounding schools and boys and girls put on the same – [of] course, picnic supper, musical programs, all day singing with dinner on the ground, and then we had a county fair.
Mr. Kolb: That was the church focus of some of these activities, or not?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well as I’ve said in here [refers to memoire], church was usually just a religious thing.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, and not a social thing.
Mrs. Holmberg: Not a social thing. They had Vacation Bible School in the summer, but no, it was not a social thing. School was the place you went for pie suppers and –
Mr. Kolb: Dinner and singing on the ground was not at church.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yes that was, on Sundays.
Mr. Kolb: That’s what I’ve heard, you know.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, groups who had quartets or solos, they’d go to these church things. I mean, where Y-12 [is], there’s a New Hope Baptist Church. We had, in this area, we had two churches. We had a Methodist Church and a Baptist Church. Everybody brought food, and, you know, those things are maybe a thing of the past. Our daughter who lives in Minneapolis, they won’t let you bring potluck anymore because it’s maybe – they have to cater it by registered caterers.
Mr. Kolb: Don’t know what the contamination might be.
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right, no boy scouts, no church, anything, no potlucks anymore are allowed to do that.
Mr. Kolb: We’re not that sophisticated, progress.
Mrs. Holmberg: And my father, when we left, my father bought a farm in Oliver Springs near Tri-county. We still have it and one of the farmers looks after the cattle. We hike with the dogs, cut Christmas trees, and collect wildflowers and pick blackberries. Those are our cash crops!
Mr. Kolb: Well, blackberries, yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: Some years it’s good.
Mr. Kolb: You know, it sounds like everyone was busy enough. I mean, you know, didn’t just sit around dwaddling your – of course you had no TV to waste time with and that sort of thing.
Mrs. Holmberg: No, that’s true; that was another thing, no TV. But they had –
Mr. Kolb: Radio.
Mrs. Holmberg: Wireless, you know. No, we didn’t get electricity until ’43, but had radio with a static –
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t have electricity in ’43?
Mrs. Holmberg: I don’t mean ’43. ’32.
Mr. Kolb: ’32, okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: ’32.
Mr. Kolb: Until ’32, okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: I was ten years old. I remember the day I came home and flipped the button and the light came on.
Mr. Kolb: That’s REA. Rural Electrification [Administration] brought it in, yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: Right.
Mr. Kolb: That pre-dated TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority]. TVA didn’t start till – well, Norris Dam was started in ’33, didn’t produce until ’36.
Mrs. Holmberg: But my grandmother’s sister lived in Wheat. They had a Delco plant, and that was always exciting to visit them with electric lights.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, battery; was it AC, DC power probably?
Mrs. Holmberg: I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: Delco was batteries, but I don’t know.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, they didn’t have electricity, and that’s why my dad had a thriving coal and ice business. He rented land from Blue Diamond Coal Company out in Morgan County and had a couple little mines, and they had an ice plant in Knoxville that manufactured ice, so he built a storage ice house in Oliver Springs.
Mr. Kolb: And hauled it with his truck.
Mrs. Holmberg: And he had customers for ice and coal.
Mr. Kolb: Hot and cold.
Mrs. Holmberg: Hot and cold.
Mr. Kolb: That��s the way it is, yeah. Okay. Well you have quite a family history, there’s no doubt about that.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, it’s been a great run.
Mr. Kolb: Well back to World War II era a little bit more then. You said you had a lot of – so you didn’t come into Oak Ridge to do very social activity. You met, I’m sure, lots of different kinds of people.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, we came to Oak Ridge for all the social life. I mean, that’s where my boyfriends lived, that’s where the theaters were, the restaurants, not many though, in those days, there weren’t many.
Mr. Kolb: But cafeterias –
Mrs. Holmberg: Cafeteria, and there was a –
Mr. Kolb: As a plant worker could you go to the cafeteria, I guess. Well, you had pay for your food; it was inexpensive, but you could go in the cafeteria too.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, a lot of the cafeterias were outside the area. The one in Townsite was not behind the gate, you know, was not behind the fence.
Mr. Kolb: It wasn’t?
Mrs. Holmberg: Uhn-uhn.
Mr. Kolb: Townsite was outside the fence?
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh, I mean – not the security fence. If you had a badge – no you couldn’t if you didn’t have a badge to get into the area, but you didn’t have to have a security clearance to go there.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, once you got into the fence there, you could go.
Mrs. Holmberg: You could go. Of course, some of the cafeterias were behind the fence, like the ones at Y-12 and X-10.
Mr. Kolb: But there were places like where downtown is. Wasn’t there a cafeteria there too?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: In the shopping center there?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, but I’m not sure they were open in the evening. I guess they were.
Mr. Kolb: Some of them were.
Mrs. Holmberg: There was a restaurant in the bowling alley. I remember that.
Mr. Kolb: Up in Jackson Square?
Mrs. Holmberg: ’Cause we’d like to take our kids there. When they got restless they could go look at the –
Mr. Kolb: Which bowling alley? The Grove Center?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, Grove Center. There was a restaurant there. And the Mayflower was there.
Mr. Kolb: The Mayflower was up there, yeah, and the T&C Cafeteria, T&C? Right near the bowling alley in Jackson Square. That was the one when I got there, yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: In the very early days –
Mr. Kolb: But, I mean, you came into Oak RIdge for a lot of these different activities, then, yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, most of the –
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause it was so busy.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah and there were things to do here.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, and the people you met were from all over, right?
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right. Especially socially, because most of the people who I knew from before Oak Ridge went home at night, you know; they weren’t here. I had a roommate at UT who lived over by Bull Run and I saw her all the time, but I didn’t see many of my old friends ’cause they’d moved away.
Mr. Kolb: But there still were young people in the area.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, I graduated Oak Ridge, Robertsville High School. My sister had more friends, ’cause she was younger than me and she went to Oliver Springs, so she had a lot of friends there from school, but my friends from school were – well, I worked here and made new friends and it was a community where everybody was new to the area. It was like being pioneers, you know; you were always together trying to find a house, work at the same plants, so it was sort of a joint adventure.
Mr. Kolb: That’s right. Now you worked at Y-12. Did you know much about what was going on at X-10 or Happy Valley at that time, K-25?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well I knew something. I used to go on vacation in Florida with about – six or eight of us gals would hop on the train. We went on the train to Florida and spent the week. In fact, we were there when they dropped the bomb.
Mr. Kolb: Where?
Mrs. Holmberg: In Jacksonville, Florida. Not Jacksonville – St. Augustine. We’d gone down there and rented rooms in a house on the beach.
Mr. Kolb: Vacation.
Mrs. Holmberg: And at that time they had a curfew on the coast. Everything had to be blacked out because they were worried about submarines. And that night we broke the rules and went out on the beach to see the waves, you know, and the lady who ran the house heard us and she became very upset. She said she could lose her license if her guests broke those rules, so we were really in the doghouse. And the next morning, she was knocking on our door, “Want you to see this! I want you to see this!” and they had dropped the bomb.
Mr. Kolb: Wanted to show you a paper, a newspaper?
Mrs. Holmberg: Newspaper, and she called the local newspaper and they came out and took our pictures and we were on the front page of that paper, “Oak Ridgers, Builders of the Bomb in Our City.” And none of us had been near a bomb.
Mr. Kolb: Well you were close enough, you were close, you didn’t know it, yeah.
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: – when the bomb dropped and you were celebrities, overnight.
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right, overnight, went out of the doghouse to being a celebrity.
Mr. Kolb: And so when you go back –
Mrs. Holmberg: And it was news to all of us, all of us gals. It was a surprise to us.
Mr. Kolb: So when you got back to Oak Ridge, things had calmed down a little bit or was the celebration still going on?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, they were pretty excited about what we’d been doing here, yes.
Mr. Kolb: Did some tension let off once they knew that the war was, well the war ended then shortly thereafter.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, I remember the day the war was over, a lot of us left early, went swimming at the swimming pool, you know; they said, “You can go.”
Mr. Kolb: But as I understand it, there was a big party in Oak Ridge when the bomb was dropped and the news of the bomb being made here.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, I don’t remember. Maybe we weren’t back yet.
Mr. Kolb: Well you probably weren’t, yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: But I do know we rode the train, and it was loaded with soldiers, I remember that, just packed, moving troops.
Mr. Kolb: And then Y-12 changed dramatically real fast, as I understand it, in terms of activity and [population] – I mean numbers of workers, et cetera, right after the war?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, well it was – and of course they changed contractors too. Tennessee Eastman left and Carbide took over. So we changed; it changed contractors and a lot of roads. (You want some lemonade and a cookie?)
Mr. Kolb: (Got plenty. Cookies, at least. There you go.)
Mrs. Holmberg: (When we go to our grandchildren – are we on tape? They hide the cookies ’cause we give them all.) And we had four kids, and we have one that lives here in Oak Ridge. Nancy graduated from the School of Communications in Knoxville and she’s the Marketing director for Covenant’s Affiliate markets. Doug graduated from UT and he owns Bluegrass Veneer Mill Company, and it’s a subsidiary of an international company with headquarters in Sweden, so he went there last year. And Connie went out of town. She got a political science degree at Wellesley and an MBA at Harvard. She worked for NBC in New York and for Tipper Gore in Washington, and now they’re in Wisconsin, [inaudible] and she’s stayed home, mom with four boys. Her husband took a job there last year, changed jobs. And Eric, you know, he flies F-18s. He went to Vanderbilt and then he went to the Navy post graduate school in Monterey. He got an engineering degree at Vanderbilt and post grad school at Monterey Academy, aeronautical engineering, and then they sent him to test pilot school at Patuxent River, Maryland; that’s where the astronauts go. He just got back from being deployed on the Carl Vinson, where he flew missions over Afghanistan. Now he’s back in St. Louis; he’s a liaison between Boeing and the Navy. They’re bringing up a new super F-18, one a week, can you imagine that? As if we need that many.
Mr. Kolb: They probably cost a billion dollars each.
Mrs. Holmberg: He tests those. He doesn’t have to do the first testing. Boeing does it, but then he has to look at it to see if it’s –
Mr. Kolb: He’s keeping the Navy side of it, yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: For the Navy’s specifications, and then he still does some flying, then often delivers them. Most of them are going to Lemoore, California.
Mr. Kolb: You’ve got an active family then.
Mrs. Holmberg: They’re busy.
Mr. Kolb: They’re busy, but most of them are –
Mrs. Holmberg: Ten grandchildren.
Mr. Kolb: – are in this area, and St. Louis.
Mrs. Holmberg: St. Louis and, well, we’re lucky ’cause for a while we had two of them in California for several years, so it was fun to go there.
Mr. Kolb: Well sure, yeah, right. But anyway back to World War II years, Y-12 calmed down a lot, but you still worked there in the lab, right, till ’49, you said?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But the pace was a lot different, I guess, in terms of excitement. Or was it? Were you still very busy?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yes it was. I miss it, I think, but I got involved with the Children’s Playhouse. I worked on the board of the Children’s Playhouse, and senior
Playhouse.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, before you got married?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, no this was after – actually when the kids were little. Well, the pace did slow down, somewhat, but we still had our group of friends. Most of the things we did then was maybe parties at people’s houses. You didn’t go out (look at our woodpecker) we didn’t go out dancing as much or away, but it’s mostly people’s houses. We did that.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, and a lot of talented people in town, basically do interesting things.
Mrs. Holmberg: Right, and as a family we did lots of camping, ’cause we liked the outdoors.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, and good facilities around, close by.
Mrs. Holmberg: The mountains, state parks, and the national parks.
Mr. Kolb: Yep. Well, it’s an interesting area to live in, that’s for sure. If you’re healthy, there’s no limits almost.
Mrs. Holmberg: And one thing I enjoy doing, I used to, not too long ago, I worked with Anderson County Literacy Program and teaching adults, and we had mostly friends over, and I did that at Willowbrook School teaching adults to read, and we sort of worked ourselves out of a job ’cause they got proficient enough that they could go get jobs, you know. They could speak some English and learn some customs and get the jobs.
Mr. Kolb: That’s what you want.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yes, we wanted.
Mr. Kolb: That’s good, yeah, although I hear there’s more Latinos moving in. Of course, they mostly know English, I guess, but the Vietnamese, they came in during the sixties and seventies they were pretty, you know, non-literate for a while. Anyway, I think we should try to capture maybe something of the interesting incidents in your life. Can you think of unique activities or incidents or happenings, whatever, come to mind? Things that were really different, if you will.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, I’m always talking about family, but I told you when my mom retired from the plant, she suddenly got a string of horses and ponies, and our kids, she and our kids participated in the horse show circuits. I never could get really interested in that, but we furnished the kids and she furnished the horses and the expertise.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, your children were riders.
Mrs. Holmberg: Rode for her. She was in good health, but she got cancer and died at age eighty. She had won a blue ribbon at the fair in Knoxville in the Autumn before she died the next year, so she was a very active gal and that was a big part of our life. And scouting, the kids got a lot of benefits from the scouting program.
Mr. Kolb: One thing I didn’t know about till I talked to Grady Whitman, he said that he was in the SED unit, Special Engineering Detachment, and he said there was a very active athletic program through the SED. They had their own football team, their own basketball team –
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, they had a basketball team and a something team.
Mr. Kolb: And they played, you know, other teams in the area during World War II.
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: I mean, I never knew about that.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah there was.
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever see any of their games?
Mrs. Holmberg: Actually, I dated a guy who was on the basketball team, SED basketball.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, was Bob not a basketball player, your husband? He’s pretty tall.
Mrs. Holmberg: No he’s not coordinated. He once coached a church basketball team, but he never played. And they had a – I know they had a softball or a baseball and a basketball team ’cause I’ve gone on picnics and parties with the basketball. And they’ve had some SED reunions. We went to the first few. Actually, there were so many people from K-25 that we didn’t know. We sort of got to be a captive audience witnessing everybody’s personal history all afternoon. The first we went to was a resort in Gatlinburg with rocking chairs in the front porch and dinner there. It was an overnight affair, so it was fabulous, you know, you could mingle with everybody. Then it got to the point where it’s just all go in a room and listen.
Mr. Kolb: So you weren’t aware of that athletic activity?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, and I wasn’t aware of that for a long time. And that was in addition to the high school athletics of course, right? That was also present.
Mrs. Holmberg: Of course, there wasn’t a girls basketball team at the high school, and when our daughter – our daughter is six feet tall and she played in the church league – but there wasn’t a high school ball team. I don’t know when they first started basketball at the high school, but –
Mr. Kolb: Well, it was quite a while, yeah. I don’t know, it was seventies? I just don’t know, but it was a long time. Well I’m sure you had a lot of exciting dates, you know, with all these different characters around here, all these different fellows. Bob’s from Iowa, and who knows who else you dated. I mean, you could play the field and have a lot of fun.
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh, you could, because in the building I worked in there weren’t many women and most everybody was here right out of college, unattached, so they were looking for somebody to go out with, and so it wasn’t hard to find a boyfriend.
Mr. Kolb: And the tennis court dances were popular and outdoors and rec centers and all.
Mrs. Holmberg: And Bob likes to tell the story of how we met. I told you I had a friend from Chicago that was a very close friend of mine. He was dating somebody and they broke up, so he wanted to – no, I guess I had broken up. He wanted a car, so he introduced me to Bob so we could double date and have a car to leave Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: The car was the object, not the date.
Mrs. Holmberg: The car was the object, ’cause cars were very scarce. Most people that came here didn’t have a car. They were hard to get and they normally didn’t have the money to buy them with either. We only had one car, so carpools were very common to nursery school, dance class, whatever, and Bob was in a five man carpool most of the time. I mean, right in this neighborhood there were five people. Except I guess near the end, he got tired of that.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but you could always take the bus to get around, you know, if you wanted to, during wartime.
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right. Actually they took those city buses out in about ’54.
Mr. Kolb: That’s the year I came, yeah. I rode it one time to work.
Mrs. Holmberg: Because I remember saying to Nancy, you know, they’re taking the buses out. Let’s take the bus downtown, so she could ride on the bus, and she was two years old in ’54.
Mr. Kolb: It’s amazing they lasted that long, in a way, but the federal government was paying for it I’m sure, I assume.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yes, they seemed to hire anybody who came down the pike. And there’s a saying there’s still bitterness from people who lived here that had to move. But I think once they settled in and got jobs and probably [were] better off, property values went up. In fact, that was one of the problems that we had is that we got paid such a paltry sum that you couldn’t go out and buy – and I don’t know how my folks got the money to buy the place. I never knew. It didn’t look to me like they were making much money, but they did it somehow.
Mr. Kolb: As I understand it, the value you were given was so much per acre and the value of the house and the farm wasn’t even really included, so, you know, you really lost the value of your house, of your buildings, sounds like. [Is] that the way you understand it?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, I know John Rice Irwin talked about in an article that he’s written, I guess, in These Are Our Voices, talks about all the buildings they had, and his parents’ house. His grandparents’ house was a lovely place out in the area of the Marina. It was a big old Victorian house, and most of the houses were pretty nice. They were frame houses, two-story, you know, not any log cabins.
Mr. Kolb: And they were all bulldozed, basically.
Mrs. Holmberg: They were all bulldozed.
Mr. Kolb: Now there’s one house down on the east end of the turnpike – is it just outside Elza Gate – that’s an old, old house.
Mrs. Holmberg: It’s a brick house.
Mr. Kolb: Right. Is it authentic? I mean pre-World War II house?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, but it wasn’t there very long before – you know, the Red Cross building on the turnpike was a pre –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I didn’t know it was a pre-war. I thought, well, I didn’t know that.
Mrs. Holmberg: And of course the –
Mr. Kolb: What was it used for?
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh, it was somebody’s house.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, somebody’s house, okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: And Kim Son Restaurant was my uncle’s grocery store.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it was the old Crossroads Tavern before that, right.
Mrs. Holmberg: And, let’s see, oh, over by the old Holiday Inn where the weather station is, that’s a pre-Oak Ridge house.
Mr. Kolb: Where NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] is? That building or – I didn’t know that. I knew it was World War II, but I didn’t know it predated.
Mrs. Holmberg: It predated Manhattan Project.
Mr. Kolb: Is it a big home? I mean, it’s a pretty good size building; it must have been a huge house.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well are we talking about the same place? I know the weather station. Is it NOAA? The weather station’s in it now.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah the NOAA research, yeah, okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, yeah, the neighbor across the street.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, yeah, I knew it was. I didn’t know it predated Oak Ridge, I mean, World War II. Well, that’s interesting. I’ve seen it right there. But I didn’t know about the Red Cross. I was told [the] Red Cross building was used as a, what do you call it, where people got their housing? A housing office, I was told, during World War II.
Mrs. Holmberg: It may have been.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, any other interesting incidents you might think of during World War II or maybe before you might want to contribute?
Mrs. Holmberg: Can’t think of anything very outstanding.
Mr. Kolb: You already admitted to breaking the rules on the beach at St. Augustine, you know, lived through that.
Mrs. Holmberg: No, I think I was a pretty good guy. Well, when they asked me to send in those Acme cards, you know, I never, never told anybody. I would drop them in the mailbox so they wouldn’t see in the mail collection.
Mr. Kolb: It was an Acme card?
Mrs. Holmberg: It was an Acme Credit Company, but it was going into security. I mean, that was the name of the address where these were picked up in a post office box. I never told anybody that I was doing that. They asked me not to. But I didn’t see anything.
Mr. Kolb: Well, they were asking you to record incidents?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, asked me to report if I saw anything suspicious.
Mr. Kolb: Unusual.
Mrs. Holmberg: Every week, I had to send one in.
Mr. Kolb: Every week?
Mrs. Holmberg: Uh-huhn.
Mr. Kolb: Just through –
Mrs. Holmberg: Gave me a whole stack of envelopes.
Mr. Kolb: Everybody got those?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, just, I never saw – I don’t know who had one.
Mr. Kolb: You know why you were picked?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, I don’t know why I was picked. They just called me up one day and asked me to come and talk to them about it, at the Castle on the Hill, and if I would do it.
Mr. Kolb: Let me ask you one thing. There were black people living and working in the project, of course. Did you ever meet any of them during the war? I mean have any social interactions? I mean, probably not, but I mean maybe.
Mrs. Holmberg: No, we had a dishwasher in the lab who washed the beakers and glassware, but didn’t see them socially. Now our kids did, you know, Ronnie Griffin, and –
Mr. Kolb: In school.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, in school.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause the schools were integrated by that time.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah. Yeah, I guess they were. When she got into high school – of course, they weren’t integrated when they were little, because they tried to help integrate the skating rink. They weren’t allowed there, and so they said you had to be a member to skate, and the only way you could come in there as a new skater is if you were sponsored by – so our kids – they were going to Unitarian Church – so a group, three or four kids, several kids took black members with them to skate, and they wouldn’t let them in. And then they put our kids’ names on the bulletin board that weren’t allowed to skate again.
Mr. Kolb: Blacklisted. They were non-membered.
Mrs. Holmberg: They were non-members that weren’t allowed to come in. And they actually closed their doors without – in fact, our daughter just gave a talk the other day. If you’re [a] pre-Oak Ridger, you get asked to talk. Well, she was talking about the educational opportunities for women now for University Women’s Association. She had done some research, and two places that were the hardest to integrate was barbershops and hair salons and laundromats, they were the last to give in. And the skating rink closed their doors.
Mr. Kolb: Is that the one here in Oak Ridge? ’Cause it’s lasted a long time.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah it was; it was down here at Jefferson Circle.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I was thinking of the one out there east, on the east end of town, the skating rink.
Mrs. Holmberg: No this was down at Jefferson Circle.
Mr. Kolb: That was a long time ago, yeah, okay, I see.
Mrs. Holmberg: No, I’m sorry, it was on the turnpike about where –
Mr. Kolb: Near Jefferson Avenue.
Mrs. Holmberg: Where that bank is, that is closed.
Mr. Kolb: Right, yeah, that would be right at the corner, yeah, used to be.
Mrs. Holmberg: In fact the Ku Klux Klan – maybe you’ve heard this at one of the ORICL [Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning] classes – the Ku Klux Klan came. They had brought them in, down at Jefferson Circle. There’s a Y[WCA] here, and the black folks and the supporters of the black folks stayed in this triangle while the Ku Klux Klan marched around. But there were no incidents. Nobody got violent. Of course, it was closely watched, I think.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, when was that, do you have any idea when that was?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, I don’t know. They had a couple of black ladies and friends over, and [they] were on a panel that I heard talk about that.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but Oak Ridge is just like any other community with segregated housing – that black kids had to go to separate schools. Everything was really separate.
Mrs. Holmberg: That’s right, and the high school kids had to go to Knoxville. The Scarboro School was a black [school]. You know, UT had a farm office there.
Mr. Kolb: That was the black elementary school?
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, that was a local elementary school. That’s a pre-Oak Ridge building too. And I think that’s why they called the village down there Scarboro, because that’s not really Scarboro as I knew it. Scarboro is out by the –
Mr. Kolb: Right, on Bethel Valley road.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well out at the end of Raccoon Valley Road, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Well, was that name, Scarboro, was [that] just a family name for that locality?
Mrs. Holmberg: I don’t know. Our mailing address for all this area was Edgemoor.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, it was?
Mrs. Holmberg: The post office was Edgemoor. Edgemoor is –
Mr. Kolb: I never knew that. So that was another community?
Mrs. Holmberg: Edgemoor is across the – let’s see, how can I tell you – oh, when you take a road to Pellissippi, if you turn right, you go to Pellissippi; if you turn left, you go to Edgemoor. It’s not there anymore, I think, but that’s where the post office was, in that area.
Mr. Kolb: So it’s east, east of Oak Ridge. Around the east end of Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah. It was actually outside of the area that was incorporated.
Mr. Kolb: I’m trying to think – what’s the name of the – Paul Elza. Where does that name come from? Was that Paul Elza, Elza Gate?
Mrs. Holmberg: I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: You don’t know.
Mrs. Holmberg: Now, Robertsville –
Mr. Kolb: But, I’ve heard that name, Paul Elza, and the gate was named, it was a gate on the east end, right?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well there was an Elza community there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay.
Mrs. Holmberg: There was an Elza community, and there were – you’ve heard of notorious Nash Copeland stories, the pictures and stuff he was in.
Mr. Kolb: Notorious?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, I mean, it’s well known. And his brother, Glenn Copeland, ran a grocery store out at Elza Gate in the Elza community. The two brothers had stores.
Mr. Kolb: And Nash Copeland had the gas station and general store, kind of.
Mrs. Holmberg: And then on the corner of Robertsville, where Kim Son is, my uncle’s grocery store was on this corner, and on the corner across the road, there was a grocery store run by Key, a man named Bill Key. So there were two stores and [a] gas station and various and sundry things, you know. You could probably buy a lamp, clothes, and stuff. And then there weren’t any more stores on this Robertsville Road until you get down near Wheat, you know. The little communities had stores and churches and schools.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but I’ve been told by some people who were really outsiders that when they went to Knoxville to shop or whatever, they were looked down upon or [that there was] jealousy between the locals in Knoxville or Clinton and people out here in the project. As a native, did you have any experience like that?
Mrs. Holmberg: No, I never experienced that, no. I never saw that. I mean, I don’t know how they’d know you’re from Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Well, the saying was, the women had to wear galoshes and then take those off and put shoes on, because of the mud.
Mrs. Holmberg: Oh, so they – right, okay.
Mr. Kolb: And Oak Ridgers were tracking mud around.
Mrs. Holmberg: And also it might be that they recognized they weren’t native by the way they spoke, too.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that’s another clue to stores, yeah.
Mrs. Holmberg: And maybe they recognized me as a native, and –
Mr. Kolb: But you didn’t feel any feeling about –
Mrs. Holmberg: No.
Mr. Kolb: That’s good. Some people did, some people did not. But anything else?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, we shopped a lot with friends, and I really never experienced it. I don’t know of any friends who did, but I’m sure it could happen, because there was bitterness even though it certainly improved the economy in this area, and improved their business in the stores, I’m sure.
[break in recording]
Mrs. Holmberg: I said you covered a broad range of descriptions of how things were before, during, and after. That’s a nice connection. It’s all nice. I mean, I enjoyed – I was lonesome when school was out, and I didn’t want school to be out when I was in grade school cause all my friends scattered everywhere, you know.
Mrs. Garland: It was a long way to go play with your friends, wasn’t it?
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, not really. Actually, our houses were pretty close together, you know, just a fence between.
Mr. Kolb: Just a –
Mrs. Holmberg: Yeah, but my mom, you know, when we lived here, there were kids in the neighborhood, and Connie would say, “Bye, I’m going to Ella’s.” So I’d say, “Okay.” But my mom and most of the people didn’t do that. You didn’t go unless you were invited, you know, so you didn’t feel free to just run next door or up the street or someplace unless they asked you. And maybe they didn’t –
Mrs. Garland: Which made it very inconvenient, because you didn’t have telephones, even.
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, that may not be completely the truth. [It] just might have been my mom’s attitude, you know. Like here, ’cause we all sort of came up together with having kids and there’s hardly any kids in the neighborhood, but it used to be full, you know, to have a football game in the yard, and kids going to the creek, and they had lots to do. And I didn’t have that much to do, so I got sort of lonesome. But my grandfather was a lot of fun, so I hung around with him on the farm; my dad was away at work.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right. Well, you know, it was a small family, had to become more dependent on other kids, you’re right, yeah. When you talk to Colleen Black, she’s one of eight, one of ten – she had eight children. She’s one of ten. No problem having –
Mrs. Holmberg: Well, the challenge was finding a place where you didn’t have people.
Mr. Kolb: Having kids, yeah, right, how to get privacy.
Mrs. Holmberg: Have you seen that slide that she made with all of them in bed?
[end of recording]